“Not much that I can see,” I said proudly, sticking my hands into my pockets and wishing I’d remembered to bring gloves. “Of course, I’ve only covered a fairly small space of her career so far. There’s a whole lot that’s attributed to her later on, and I’m guessing only about half of it is probable.”
“Shouldn’t she improve as she goes on?” asked Colin, considering the question seriously. “With increased experience and a larger network of agents, there’s no reason she shouldn’t have been able to do more.”
I hunched my chin into my turtleneck in an attempt to keep it warm. “Yeah, but could she defy the laws of time and space? It’s one thing to be responsible for putting down French plots on either side of the Channel”
“A lot of Frogs on the other side of the Channel,” intoned Colin in
Fawlty Towers
tones.
I made a face at him. “Fine. She can have France. I’ll even grant her Portugal and Spain. But India? And Russia? I just don’t buy it.”
“Why not? People did move around, even all the way to India and back.”
“But the timing never quite works. How could she be in India to deal with a Mahratta rebellion and in France to try to stop Napoleon’s coronation all at the same time?”
“Delegation?” suggested Colin. “Deputies?”
“Possibly,” I said, frowning. “But which was where when?”
Colin’s eyes crinkled in that way that never failed to make my stomach do flip-flops. “Will the real Pink Carnation please stand up?”
“Something like that,” I agreed. “I’ve even seen assertions that the League of the Purple Gentian got back into business later on, but I’m assuming that must be a typo.”
“Or not,” said Colin mysteriously. Before I could quiz him on it, he asked, “Where are you planning to look next?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” I admitted. “I’ve been so focused on the Black Tulip for the past month, that now that I know exactly who he was, I’m not sure where to go next.”
“What about Selwick Hall?”
I was so wrapped up in my own train of thought that it took a moment for his meaning to seep through. As I looked blankly up at Colin, he elaborated: “We still have papers you haven’t seen yet. There are heaps I’ve never looked at, and I doubt anyone else has, either. Except maybe Aunt Arabella,” he added as an afterthought.
“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you to think I was pulling a Dempster and using you just for your papers.”
Colin grinned down at me. “I’ve come to terms with the fact that you’re just using me for my body.”
Naturally, after that, it was impossible to say anything at all for quite a few moments. But while London is full of convenient cul-de-sacs for lovers’ meetings, the climate isn’t nearly so accommodating. I defy anyone to stand outside and smooch in forty-degree weather with a stinging drizzle beginning to come down.
Among other things, the cold was making my nose run. I swiped surreptitiously at it with one hand as Colin wedged my bag under one arm and wrenched at the Velcro fastenings of his umbrella.
Putting up his umbrella over both of us, Colin looked inquiringly down at me. “What do you think? Would you like to come down to Selwick Hall for a week and root about in the library?”
Was the Black Tulip French?
Oh, wait, he wasn’t. But he’d been working for them. Besides, the Stuarts had quite a few French Princesses in their family tree, like Bonnie Prince Charlie’s great-grandmother, Henrietta Maria, who had been Louis XIV’s aunt. Either way, the answer was crystal clear.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t mind having me?”
Colin gave me a look. It was a very eloquent look. I capitulated instantlyrather like the French.
“I can’t think of anything I would like better,” I said honestly.
“Brilliant,” said Colin.
In a contented silence, hand in hand, we strolled off into the stinging December rain.
Historical Note
Some of you may be asking what a Jacobite Pretender is doing as the villain in a Napoleonic novel. (Or if you aren’t, you should be.) As with everything else, you can blame that on Lord Vaughn. Of all my characters, Lord Vaughn is the most rooted in the eighteenth century. His manners, his mores, his mind-setall look back to the heyday of the Whig aristocracy, to an era of refined wit rather than Romantic excess. Both the barge on the Thames and the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall, while still in use in the early nineteenth century, bear the savor of the prior century, just like Vaughn.
Like Vaughn, Jacobitism also properly belongs more to the eighteenth century than the nineteenthwhich made it just the right sort of foil for Vaughn. The Jacobite cause, which gave successive Hanoverian Georges nasty nightmares, had its origin in the expulsion of James II from the throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Glorious for some, but not for James’s descendants, who spent the next century in ineffectual attempts to regain the throne. James II’s son, known variously as James III, the Chevalier of St. George, or the Old Pretender, made a bid for the throne in 1715. After that failed, his son, Prince Charles Edward, popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, made another attempt in 1745, which was brutally squashed on the battlefields of Scotland. Although the cause largely petered out with the death of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1788, halfhearted plots continued to be made and toasts drunk well into the nineteenth century. George III cannily neutralized Charles’s brother, the would-be Henry IX, by putting him on the royal payroll in 1801, thus forestalling any rebellions out of him, but Bonnie Prince Charlie’s illegitimate grandson was still touting his right to the English throne as late as 1850.
Like Eloise, I spent a semester in grad school reading up on Jacobite activities and iconography. The motto
spes tamen est una
was indeed the slogan on a medal struck by Bonnie Prince Charlie for his child and heironly that child was his illegitimate daughter, Charlotte, whom he created with the Duchess of Albany, rather than his apocryphal illegitimate son, James. Might Charles have had an illegitimate son of the right age? As Eloise pointed out, it’s not an impossibility. His long-term mistress, Clementina Walkinshaw, left him in 1760 (driven away by his drunkenness, or so the story goes), leaving a convenient twelve-year gap until his marriage in 1772 to a German princess of irreproachable lineage, Louisa of Stolberg-Gedern (who also eventually left him). A child born during those twelve years would be just the right age to be the Black Tulip
.
For those interested in learning more about Jacobitism in all its aspects, including its survivals into the nineteenth century, I highly recommend Paul Monod’s excellent monograph on the topic,
Jacobitism and the English People.
A few other legitimate historical characters and organizations were pressed into service for the purposes of this story. Thomas Paine was, in fact, a master corset-maker before becoming a writer of incendiary pamphlets. His pamphlet on the expected invasion of England by Bonaparte (imaginatively titled “To the People of England on the Invasion of England”) wasn’t actually published until 1804, but I took the liberty of moving it up a few months for dramatic effect. Joseph Priestley and his allegiances and experiments were also taken from his life. Priestley was, indeed, hounded out of England after his infamous “gunpowder” comment, and he did isolate “dephlogisticated air” or, as we now call it, oxygen. The Common Sense Society, named after Paine’s famous pamphlet, was loosely based on the Revolution Society (lambasted by Edmund Burke in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
), of which Priestley was a member. Priestley’s disciple, Rathbone, the Common Sense Society, and the Société des Droits des Hommes were entirely my own inventions, and not to be blamed on anyone else.
About the Author
Lauren Willig holds graduate degrees in both law and history from Harvard and is a second-year litigation associate at a New York law firm.
