The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

‘Lauren Willig balances her knowledge of English history with a veritable passion for English spies, turning out a deftly hilarious, sexy novel’ Eloisa James, author of
Kiss Me, Annabel

‘A fun read’ 
Mary Balogh, author of
The Secret Pearl

‘A historical novel with a modern twist. I loved the way Willig dips back and forth from Eloise’s love affair and her swish parties to the Purple Gentian and of course the lovely, feisty Amy. The unmasking of the Pink Carnation is a real surprise’ Mina Ford, author of
My Fake Wedding

‘In her swashbuckling debut…Willig reimagines France under Napoleon besieged by a whole bouquet of spying floral foes…bad news for the Bonapartes but barrels of good-natured fun for the rest of us’
Library Journal

‘A juicy mystery… Chick lit never had it so good!’
Complete Woman

‘Imaginative…a decidedly delightful romp’
Booklist

‘[A] breezy historical romance… The sparks fly’
Publishers Weekly

‘Funny, entertaining, and witty’
A Romance Review

‘A delightful debut’
Round Table Reviews

‘An adventurous, witty blend of historical romance and chick lit…will delight readers who like their love stories with a bit of a twist’ Jamestown News (NC)

‘[A] playful romp…effervescent prose…a sexy [and] determined-to-charm historical romance debut’
Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Historical Note
Excerpt
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
The Masque of the Black Tulip
The Deception of theEmerald Ring
The Seduction of the Crimson Rose
The Temptation of the Night Jasmine
About the Author
 By Lauren Willig
Copyright

Acknowledgments

L
ike first-time Oscar winners, who thank everyone from their first-grade teacher to that great chiropractor they saw last month, and have to be hauled offstage by the scruff of their tuxes, I have many, many people to whom I owe most humble thanks for the existence of this book. Unlike those Oscar winners, there’s no orchestra waiting to strike up if I babble too long. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And the acknowledgments go to…

Brooke, little sister and favourite heroine-in-training, for providing plot ideas, giggling over the giggly bits, and nobly refraining from bludgeoning me every time I squealed, ‘Ooh! Come see this bit of dialogue I just wrote!’ The next book is yours, Brookiefly!

Nancy Flynn, most kindred spirit ever, for scads of publishing advice, even more scads of moral support, and for giving the Purple Gentian his name.

Abby Vietor, for playing fairy godmother to the Pink Carnation all the way, from reading early chapters to whisking the finished manuscript off to Joe (see under Agent, Super) – this book wouldn’t be here without you.

Claudia Brittenham, for knowing my characters better than I do, care packages of candied violets, and retrieving my sense of humour when I misplace it.

Eric Friedman, for listening to three years of babble about the Purple Gentian – even if he did want to call it
The Rogue Less
Travelled.

The wonderful women of the Harvard history department, Jenny Davis, Liz Mellyn, Rebecca Goetz and Sara Byala, for always being there with a coffee or a cosmo.

Joe Veltre, aka Super Agent, for taking a mix of sheep jokes, French bashing, and the occasional heaving bosom and moulding it into a book.

Laurie Chittenden, my fabulous editor, for shooing away the sheep, and keeping the manuscript from bloating to
War and Peace
proportions.

Finally, the brilliant ladies of the Beau Monde and Writing Regency, for knowing about everything from Napoleon’s politics to the cut of Beau Brummel’s waistcoat, and sharing it all with me despite my lapse into the modern.

Thank you all!

Prologue

T
he Tube had broken down. Again.

I clutched the overhead rail by dint of standing on the tippiest bit of my tippy toes. My nose banged into the arm of the man next to me. A Frenchman, judging from the black turtleneck and the fact that his armpit ‘was a deodorant-free zone’. Murmuring apologies in my best faux English accent, I tried to squirm out from under his arm, tripped over a protruding umbrella, and stumbled into the denim-covered lap of the man sitting in front of me.

‘Cheers,’ he said with a wink, as I wiggled my way off his leg.

Ah, ‘cheers,’ that wonderful multipurpose English term for anything from ‘hello’ to ‘thank you’ to ‘nice ass you have there.’ Bright red (a shade that doesn’t do much for my auburn hair), I peered about for a place to hide. But the Tube was packed solid, full of tired, cranky Londoners on their way home from work. There wasn’t enough room for a reasonably emaciated snake to slither its way through the crowd, much less a healthy American girl who had eaten one too many portions of fish and chips over the past two months.

Um, make that about fifty too many portions of fish and chips. Living in a basement flat with a kitchen the size of a peapod doesn’t inspire culinary exertions.

Resuming my spot next to the smirking Frenchman, I wondered, for the five-hundredth time, what had ever possessed me to come to London.

Sitting in my carrel in Harvard’s Widener Library, peering out of my little scrap of window at the undergrads scuttling back and forth beneath the underpass, bowed double under their backpacks like so many worker ants, applying for a fellowship to spend the year researching at the British Library seemed like a brilliant idea. No more student papers to grade! No more hours of peering at microfilm! No more Grant.

Grant.

My mind lightly touched the name, then shied away again. Grant. The other reason I was playing sardines on the Tube in London, rather than happily spooling through microfilm in the basement of Widener.

I ended it with him. Well, mostly. Finding him in the cloakroom of the Faculty Club at the history department Christmas party in a passionate embrace with a giggly art historian fresh out of undergrad did have something to do with it, so I couldn’t claim he was entirely without a part in the break up. But I was the one who tugged the ring off my finger and flung it across the room at him in time-honoured, pissed-off female fashion.

Just in case anyone was wondering, it wasn’t an engagement ring.

The Tube lurched back to life, eliciting a ragged cheer from the other passengers. I was too busy trying not to fall back into the lap of the man sitting in front of me. To land in someone’s lap once is carelessness; to do so twice might be considered an invitation.

Right now, the only men I was interested in were long-dead ones.

The Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation… The very music of their names invoked a forgotten era, an era of men in knee breeches and frock coats who duelled with witty barbs sharper than the points of their swords. An era when men could be heroes.

The Scarlet Pimpernel, rescuing countless men from the guillotine; the Purple Gentian, driving the French Ministry of Police mad with his escapades, and foiling at least two attempts to assassinate King George III; and the Pink Carnation… I don’t think there was a single newspaper in London between 1803 and 1814 that
didn’t carry at least one mention of the Pink Carnation, the most elusive spy of them all.

The other two, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian, had each, in their turn, been unmasked by the French as Sir Percy Blakeney and Lord Richard Selwick. They had retired to their estates in England to raise precocious children and tell long stories of their days in France over their post-dinner port. But the Pink Carnation had never been caught.

At least not yet.

That was what I planned to do – to hunt the elusive Pink Carnation through the archives of England, to track down any sliver of long-dead gossip that might lead me to what the finest minds in the French government had failed to discover.

Of course, that wasn’t how I phrased it when I suggested the idea to my dissertation advisor.

I made scholarly noises about filling a gap in the historiography, and the deep sociological significance of spying as a means of asserting manhood, and other silly ideas couched in intellectual unintelligibility. I called it ‘Aristocratic Espionage during the Wars with France: 1789–1815.’

Rather a dry title, but somehow I doubt ‘Why I Love Men in Black Masks’ would have made it past my dissertation committee. It all seemed perfectly simple back in Cambridge. There must have been some sort of contact between the three aristocrats who had donned black masks in order to outwit the French; the world of the upper class in early nineteenth-century England was a small one, and I couldn’t imagine that men who had all spied in France wouldn’t share their expertise with one another. I knew the identities of Sir Percy Blakeney and Lord Richard Selwick – in fact, there was a sizable correspondence between those two men. Surely, there would be something in their papers, some slip of the pen that would lead me to the Pink Carnation.

But there was
nothing
in the archives. Nothing. So far, I’d read twenty years’ worth of Blakeney estate accounts and Selwick laundry
lists. I’d even trekked out to the sprawling Public Record Office in Kew, hauling myself and my laptop through the locker rooms and bag searches to get to the early nineteenth-century records of the War Office. I should have remembered that they call it the
secret service
for a reason. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Not even a cryptic reference to ‘our flowery friend’ in an official report.

Getting panicky, because I didn’t really want to have to write about espionage as an allegory for manhood, I resorted to my plan of last resort. I sat on the floor of Waterstone’s, with a copy of
Debrett’s Peerage
open in my lap, and wrote letters to all the surviving descendants of Sir Percy Blakeney and Lord Richard Selwick. I didn’t even care if they had access to the family archives (that was how desperate I was getting), I’d settle for family stories, half-remembered tales Grandpapa used to tell about that crazy ancestor who was a spy in the 1800s, anything that might give me some sort of lead as to where to look next.

I sent out twenty letters. I received three responses.

The proprietors of the Blakeney estate sent me an impersonal form letter listing the days the estate was open to the public; they helpfully included the fall 2003 schedule for Scarlet Pimpernel reenactments. I could think of few things more depressing than watching overeager tourists prancing around in black capes, twirling quizzing glasses, and exclaiming, ‘Sink me!’

The current owner of Selwick Hall was even more discouraging. He sent a letter typed on crested stationery designed to intimidate, informing me that Selwick Hall was still a private home, it was not open to the public in any capacity, and any papers the family intended for the public to view were in the British Library. Although Mr Colin Selwick did not specifically say ‘sod off,’ it was heavily implied.

But all it takes is one, right?

And that one, Mrs Arabella Selwick-Alderly, was currently waiting for me at – I dug the dog-eared scrap of paper out of my pocket as I scurried up the stairs in the South Kensington Tube station – 45 Onslow Square.

It was raining, of course. It generally is when one has forgotten one’s umbrella.

Pausing on the doorstep of 43 Onslow Square, I ran my fingers through my rain-dampened hair and took stock of my appearance. The brown suede Jimmy Choo boots that had looked so chic in the shoe store in Harvard Square were beyond repair, matted with rain and mud. My knee-length herringbone skirt had somehow twisted itself all the way around, so that the zipper stuck out stiffly in front instead of lying flat at the back. And there was a sizable brownish blotch on the hem of my thick beige sweater – the battle stain of an unfortunate collision with someone’s cup of coffee at the British Library cafeteria that afternoon.

So much for impressing Mrs Selwick-Alderly with my sophistication and charm.

Tugging my skirt the right way round, I rang the buzzer. A crackly voice quavered, ‘Hello?’

I leant on the reply button. ‘It’s Eloise,’ I shouted into the metal grating. I hate talking into intercoms; I’m never sure if I’m pressing the right button, or speaking into the right receiver, or about to be beamed up by aliens. ‘Eloise Kelly. About the Purple Gentian?’

I managed to catch the door just before it stopped buzzing.

‘Up here,’ called a disembodied voice.

Tipping my head back, I gazed up the stairwell. I couldn’t see anyone, but I knew just what Mrs Selwick-Alderly would look like. She would have a wrinkled face under a frizz of snowy white hair, dress in ancient tweeds, and be bent over a cane as gnarled as her skin. Following the directive from on high, I began up the stairs, rehearsing the little speech I had prepared in my head the night before. I would say something gracious about how lovely it was of her to take the time to see me. I would smile modestly and express how much I hoped I could help in my own small way to rescue her esteemed ancestor from historical oblivion. And I would remember to speak loudly, in deference to elderly ears.

‘Poor girl, you look utterly knackered.’

An elegant woman in a navy blue suit made of nubby wool, with a vivid crimson-and-gold scarf tied at her neck, smiled sympathetically at me. Her snowy hair – that part of my image at least had been correct! – was coiled about her head in an elaborate confection of braids that should have been old-fashioned, but on her looked queenly. Perhaps her straight spine and air of authority made her appear taller than she was, but she made me (five feet nine inches if one counts the three-inch heels that are essential to daily life) feel short. This was not a woman with an osteoporosis problem.

My polished speech dripped away like the drops of water trickling from the hem of my raincoat. ‘Um, hello,’ I stammered.

‘Hideous weather today, isn’t it?’ Mrs Selwick-Alderly ushered me through a cream-coloured foyer, indicating that I should drop my sodden raincoat on a chair in the hall. ‘How good of you to come all the way from – the British Library, was it? – to see me on such an inhospitable day.’

I followed her into a cheerful living room, my ruined boots making squelching noises that boded ill to the faded Persian rug. A chintz sofa and two chairs were drawn up around the fire that crackled comfortably away beneath a marble mantelpiece. On the coffee table, an eclectic assortment of books had been pushed aside to make room for a heavily laden tea tray.

Mrs Selwick-Alderly glanced at the tea tray and made a little noise of annoyance. ‘I’ve forgotten the biscuits. I won’t be a minute. Do make yourself comfortable.’

Comfortable. I didn’t think there was much chance of that. Despite Mrs Selwick-Alderly’s charm, I felt like an awkward fifth-grader waiting for the headmistress to return.

Hands clasped behind my back, I wandered over to the mantel. It boasted an assortment of family photos, jumbled together in no particular order. At the far right towered a large sepia portrait photo of a debutante with her hair in the short waves of the late 1930s, a single strand of pearls about her neck, gazing soulfully upwards. The other photos were more modern and less formal, a crowd of family
photos, taken in black tie, in jeans, indoors and out, people making faces at the camera or each other; they were clearly a large clan, and a close-knit one.

One picture in particular drew my attention. It sat towards the middle of the mantel, half-hidden behind a picture of two little girls decked out as flower girls. Unlike the others, it only featured a single subject – unless you counted his horse. One arm casually rested on his horse’s flank. His dark blond hair had been tousled by the wind and a hard ride. There was something about the quirk of the lips and the clean beauty of the cheekbones that reminded me of Mrs Selwick-Alderly. But where her good looks were a thing of elegance, like a finely carved piece of ivory, this man was as vibrantly alive as the sun on his hair or the horse beneath his arm. He smiled out of the photo with such complicit good humour – as if he and the viewer shared some sort of delightful joke – that it was impossible not to smile back.

Which was exactly what I was doing when my hostess returned with a plate filled with chocolate-covered biscuits.

I started guiltily, as though I had been caught out in some embarrassing intimacy.

Mrs Selwick-Alderly placed the biscuits next to the tea tray. ‘I see you’ve found the photos. There is something irresistible about other people’s pictures, isn’t there?’

I joined her on the couch, setting my damp herringbone derriere gingerly on the very edge of a flowered cushion. ‘It’s so much easier to make up stories about people you don’t know,’ I temporised. ‘Especially older pictures. You wonder what their lives were like, what happened to them…’

‘That’s part of the fascination of history, isn’t it?’ she said, applying herself to the teapot. Over the rituals of the tea table, the choice of milk or sugar, the passing of biscuits and cutting of cake, we slipped into an easy discussion of English history, and the awkward moment passed.