The Deception of the Emerald Ring

Prologue

A watched phone never rings.

At least, my phone wasn't ringing. The same, unfortunately, could not be fsaid of the man sitting in front of me, whose mobile kept shrieking with all the abandon of an inebriated teenager on a roller coaster. Each time his phone shrilled out "Danger Zone" from Top Gun, I lunged for my bag. After a mere ten minutes on the bus, my abs had gotten more of a workout than they had in months.

I hauled my computer bag up onto my lap for easier access and slid my hand into the front pocket, just to make sure that the phone was still there. It was. Further inspection revealed that the ringer was on, the volume turned up, and all the little bars indicating signal strength blinking merrily away. Damn.

Sticking the phone back in my bag, I listened to the man in front of me recite his weekend's activities for the fifth time. They seemed primarily to involve adventures in alcohol poisoning, and an encounter with a burly bouncer that grew more elaborate with each retelling. Craning my head toward the window, I checked the progress of the traffic ahead of us. It hadn't. Progressed, that was. The bus sat as steadily immovable as an island in a tropical sea, placidly parked behind a string of other, equally immobile buses. It didn't improve the situation that the light was green.

I knew I should have taken the tube.

There had been all sorts of good reasons to choose the bus that morning, as I set out from my Bayswater flat towards the British Library. After all, the tube always broke down, and it couldn't be healthy to spend that much time underground, and the fact that it was actually not raining in England in November needed to be celebrated…. And the bus had cell reception while the Underground didn't. I glowered in the direction of my phone.

Life would be far more pleasant if I were better at fooling myself.

One day. It had only been one day by the calendar, two years in terms of agonized phone staring, and about half an hour in boy time. It is a truth universally acknowledged that time moves differently for men. There was, I reminded myself, no reason why Englishmen should differ from their American counterparts in this regard.

There was also the fact that Colin didn't have my phone number. But why let reality interfere with a good daydream? And my daydreams…Well, they weren't really the sort of thing one could get into on a public bus, even if other people—I scowled at the man in front of me, who had progressed from barhopping to amorous adventures—had no such scruples. Besides, if Colin wanted my phone number, he knew how to find it.

After a sleepless night alternating between daydream and denial, I had finally admitted to myself just how much I really hoped he wanted it. Colin was, not to put too fine a point on it, the first man who had made my pulse speed up since a breakup of massive proportions the previous winter.

Admittedly, when we'd first met, the emotion quickening in my veins hadn't been attraction. Irritation was more like it, and that sentiment, at least, had been entirely mutual. What it all boiled down to was that I was going through his family's archives and he didn't want me to.

It wasn't prurient interest that drove me to Colin's family papers, but academic desperation, the sort that sets in at some point after the third year of grad school, as the bills begin to mount, teaching bored undergrads loses its luster, and the coveted letters "Ph.D." continue to dance a mocking jig just out of reach. No dissertation, no degree. I had nightmares of becoming one of those attenuated grad students who lurk in the basement of the Harvard history department, surrounded by books so overdue that the library has long ago given up toting up the fines. Every now and again, you'll encounter one of them making the long trudge up the stairs to the first floor, and wonder who on earth they are, and how long they've been down there.

I refused to become one of the forgotten basement dwellers of Robinson Hall. Among other things, the vending machine down there had a very limited selection.

Unfortunately, the dissertation topic that I had chosen with such naive optimism at the end of my second year proved to be just like its subject: elusive. I was after a trio of spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, and the Pink Carnation, those daring men in knee breeches and black cloaks who twirled their quizzing glasses in the face of danger and never failed to confound the agents of the French Republic.

Unfortunately, they also confounded me. There was, I discovered, a reason that no one had written a book on the topic. The material just wasn't there. True, we knew who the Scarlet Pimpernel and Purple Gentian were, and even much of what they had done, but the Pink Carnation's identity remained shrouded in mystery, the only evidence of his existence a series of contemporary accounts in newsletters and diaries, each recorded exploit more improbable than the last. Some scholars, sitting in the security of their twentieth-century studies, had decreed that the dearth of corroboratory evidence could mean only one thing. The Pink Carnation was a creature of myth, a deliberate fabrication invented by the British government to buoy their beleaguered nation through a prolonged and desperate struggle.

They were wrong.

I enjoyed a good little gloat over that. There's nothing like a little "I told you so" to make one's day. On a rainy day the previous week, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, an elderly descendant of the Purple Gentian, had admitted me to a virtual Ali Baba's cave of historical documents, the diaries and letters of the Purple Gentian and his half-French bride, Miss Amy Balcourt. Then there was Amy's clever cousin, Miss Jane Wooliston—better known as the Pink Carnation. As a dashing spy, she was an unlikely choice. Whoever heard of a spy named Jane? Or Wooliston, for that matter? The very name suggested fleecy sweaters and woolly hats, a frizzy-haired Miss Marple puttering about the village green. It was the sort of discovery that had "tenure" written all over it.

Unfortunately, like Ali Baba's cave, this one came with a catch. Instead of forty thieves, my treasure trove came complete with one very irate Englishman. Mr. Colin Selwick didn't much like the idea of strangers rooting about in the family archives, and he became positively apoplectic at the prospect of the publication of his family's papers. He was also definitely, undeniably possessed of more than the ordinary measure of good looks. After a couple of late-night encounters, the sparks he was emitting weren't all of the negative variety.

Two nights ago, there had been a little incident involving a dark room, an arm above my head, and a deliberate movement forward that might have been about to turn into a kiss, when…

Brrring!

Ringing! It was ringing! I lunged for the bag and snatched out the phone, hitting the green RECEIVE button before the caller could think better of the enterprise. "Hello?" I breathed.

"Eloise?" Instead of a masculine murmur, the voice had the crackly quality of old film.

Damn. I deflated against the nubby upholstery. Served me right for not checking the number before I hit RECEIVE.

I settled the phone more firmly against my ear. "Hello, Grandma."

Grandma wasted no time on trivialities. "I'm so glad I've caught you."

I stiffened. "Why? Is something wrong?"

"I've found you a man."

"I wasn't aware I had lost one," I muttered.

Of course, that wasn't entirely true. To say I'd lost him might be a bit extreme, though. In the first place, I wasn't sure that he was mine to lose. In the second place…

In the second place, Grandma was still talking. With an effort, I dragged my attention back to the phone, just as the bus started to crawl slowly ahead. "—in Birmingham," she was saying.

"What about Birmingham?" I asked belatedly.

Over the headrest, the man in front of me gave me a dirty look. "Would you mind?" he said, gesturing to his phone.

On the other end, Grandma was clamoring for attention. "Darling, have you been listening to a word I've said?"

"Sorry," I muttered, slinking down in my seat. "I'm on the bus. It's a bit noisy." As if in retaliation, the man in front of me upped the volume.

With a hint of a huff, Grandma started over. "As I was telling you, I was at the beauty parlor yesterday, and who should I see but Muffin Watkins."

"Really! Muffin!" I exclaimed with false enthusiasm, as though I had any idea who she was.

"And she was telling me all about her son—"

"Dumpling?" I suggested. "Crumpet? Scone?"

"Andy," Grandma said pointedly. "He's a lovely boy."

"Have you met him?"

Grandma ignored that. "He just bought the loveliest new apartment. His mother was telling me all about it."

"I'm sure she was."

"Andy," declared Grandma, in the ringing tones of a CNN correspondent delivering election results, "works at Lehman Brothers."

"And Bingley has five thousand pounds a year," I murmured.

"Eloise?"

"Nothing."

"Hmph." Grandma let it go. "He's very successful, you know; only thirty-five, and he already has his own boat."

"He sounds like a regular paragon."

"So I've given your number to his mother to give to his younger brother, Jay," Grandma concluded triumphantly.

I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a moment. It didn't help. I put the phone back to my ear. "I don't get it. You're setting me up with the inferior brother?"

"Well, Andy's mother tells me he's just started seeing someone," Grandma said, as though that explained everything. "And since Jay is in England, I don't see why you can't just meet for a nice little dinner."

"Jay is in Birmingham," I protested. "You did say Birmingham, right? I'm in London. Not exactly the same place."

"They're both in England," countered Grandma placidly. "How far away can it be?"

"I'm not going to Birmingham," I said flatly.

"Eloise," Grandma said reprovingly. "You have to learn how to be flexible in a relationship."

"And we're not having a relationship! I haven't even met him."

"That's because you won't go to Birmingham."

"Grandma, people don't go to Birmingham; they go away from Birmingham. It's like New Jersey."

The man in front of me let out an indignant "Oi!" but whether it was addressed to my rising volume level or the slur to the northern metropolis was unclear.

"I just want to see you married before I die."

"We'll just have to keep you around for a good long while then, won't we?" I said brightly.

Grandma changed tactics. "I met your grandfather when I was sixteen, you know."

I knew. Oh, how I knew.

"Not everyone is as special as you, Grandma," I said politely. "Oh, look, it's my stop. I have to go."

"Jay will call you!" trilled Grandma.

"I've heard that one before," I muttered, but Grandma had already rung off. Undoubtedly to phone Mitten, or Muffin, or whatever her name was, and break out the celebratory champagne.

Grandma had been trying to marry me off, by one means or another, since I'd hit puberty. I kept hoping that, eventually, she would give up on me and switch her attention to my little sister, who, at the age of nineteen, was dangerously close to spinster-hood by Grandma's standards. So far, though, Grandma stubbornly refused to be rerouted, much to Jillian's relief. I would have admired her tenacity if it hadn't been directed at me.

I hadn't been entirely lying about it being my stop; the bus, imitating the tortoise in the old fable, was slowly inching its way past Euston station, which meant that I would be the next stop up, across the street from one of the plethora of Pizza Expresses that dotted the London landscape like glass-fronted mushrooms.

I stuffed my phone back in my bag and began the torturous process of navigating the narrow stairs down from the upper level of the bus, consoling myself with the thought that with any luck, this Jay-from-Birmingham would be as reluctant as I was to go on a family-assisted setup. I could think of few things more ghastly than sitting across the table from someone with whom the only thing I had in common was that my grandmother shared a beauty parlor with his mother. Anyone who had seen Grandma's hair would agree.

Swinging myself off the bus, I scurried through the massive iron gates that front the courtyard of the British Library. The pigeons, bloated with the lunchtime leavings of scholars and tourists, cast me baleful glances from their beady black eyes as I wove around them, making for the automatic doors at the entrance. It was early enough that there was a mere straggle of tourists lined up in front of the coat check in the basement.

Feeling superior, I made straight for the table on the other side of the room, transferring the day's essentials from my computer bag into one of the sturdy bags of clear plastic provided for researchers: laptop for transcribing documents; notebook in case the laptop broke down; pencils, ditto; mobile, for compulsive checking during lunch and bathroom breaks; wallet, for the buying of lunch; and a novel, carefully hidden between laptop and notebook, for propping up at the edge of my tray during lunchtime. The bag began to sag ominously.

I could see the point of the plastic bags as a means of preventing hardened document thieves from slipping out with a scrap of Dickens's correspondence, but it had a decidedly dampening effect on my choice of lunchtime reading material. And it was sheer hell smuggling in tampons.

Toting my bulging load, I made my way up in the elevator, past the brightly colored chairs in the mezzanine cafй, past the dispirited beige of the lunchroom, up to the third floor, where the ceilings were lower and tourists feared to tread. Perhaps "fear" was the wrong word; I couldn't imagine that they would want to.

Flashing my ID at the guard on duty at the desk in the manuscripts room, I dumped my loot on my favorite desk, earning a glare from a person studying an illuminated medieval manuscript three desks down. I smiled apologetically and insincerely, and began systematically unpacking my computer, computer cord, adapter, notebook, arraying them around the raised foam manuscript stand in the center of the desk with the ease of long practice. I'd done this so many times that I had the routine down. Computer to the right, angled in so the person next to me couldn't peek; notebook to the left, pencil neatly resting on top; bag with phone, wallet, and incriminating leisure fiction shoved as far beneath the desk as it could go, but not so far that I couldn't occasionally make the plastic crinkle with my foot to make sure it was still there and some intrepid purse snatcher disguised as a researcher hadn't crawled underneath and made off with my lunch money.

Having staked out my desk, I made for the computer station at the front of the room. I might know who the Pink Carnation was, but I stood a better chance of making my case to a skeptical academic audience if I could definitively link many, if not all, of the Pink Carnation's recorded exploits to Miss Jane Wooliston. After all, just because Jane had started out as the Pink Carnation didn't mean she had remained in possession of the title. What if, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, she had handed the name off to someone else? I didn't think so—having worked with several of Jane's letters, I couldn't imagine anyone else being able to muster quite the same combination of rigorous logic and reckless daring—but it was the sort of objection someone was sure to propound. At great length. With lots of footnotes.

I needed footnotes of my own to counteract that. It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.

From my little dip into Colin's library that past weekend, I had learned that Jane had been sent to Ireland to deal with the threat of an uprising against British rule egged on by France in the hopes that, with Ireland in disarray, England would prove an easy target. Ten points to me, since one of the daring exploits with which the Pink Carnation was credited was quelling the Irish rebellion of 1803. But I didn't know anything beyond that. I didn't have any proof that Jane was actually there. In the official histories, the failure of the rebellion tended to be attributed to a more mundane series of mistakes and misfortunes, rather than the agency of any one person.

According to the Selwick documents, Jane wasn't the only one to be dispatched to Ireland. Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, who had served as second in command of the League of the Purple Gentian, had also received his marching orders from the War Office. A search for Jane's name in the records of the British Library was sure to yield nothing, but what if I looked for Lord Pinchingdale? Ever since reading the papers at Mrs. Selwick-Alderly's flat, I'd been meaning to look into Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, anyway, if only to add more footnotes to my dissertation chapter on the internal workings of the League of the Purple Gentian.

I hadn't had a chance to pursue that angle because I had gone straight off to Sussex.

With Colin.

The agitated bleep of the computer as I accidentally leaned on one of the keys didn't do anything to make me popular with the other researchers, but it did bring me back from the remoter realms of daydream.

Right. I straightened up and purposefully punched in "Pinchingdale-Snipe." Nothing. Ah, dйjа vu. Futile archive searches had been my way of life for a very long time before I had the good fortune to stumble across the Selwicks. Clearly, I hadn't lost the knack of it. Getting back into gear, I tried just plain "Pinchingdale." Four hits! Unfortunately, three of them were treatises on botany by an eighteenth-century Pinchingdale with a horticultural bent, and one the correspondence of a Sir Marmaduke Pinchingdale, who was two hundred years too early for me, in addition to being decidedly not a Geoffrey. There was no way anyone could confuse those two names, not even with very bad spelling and even worse handwriting.

The logical thing to do would have been to call Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, Colin's aunt. Even if the materials I was looking for weren't in her private collection, she would likely have a good notion of where I should start. But to call Mrs. Selwick-Alderly veered dangerously close to calling Colin. Really, could there be anything more pathetic than looking for excuses to call his relations and fish for information about his whereabouts? I refused to be That Girl.

Of course, that begged the question of whether it was any less pathetic to check my phone for messages every five minutes.

Preferring not to pursue that line of thought, I stared blankly at the computer screen. It stared equally blankly back at me. Behind me, I could hear the subtle brush of fabric that meant someone was shuffling his feet against the carpet in a passive-aggressive attempt to communicate that he was waiting to use the terminal. Damn.

On a whim, I tapped out the name "Alsworthy," just to show that I was still doing something and not uselessly frittering away valuable computer time. From what I had read in the Selwick collection, Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe had been ridiculously besotted with a woman named Mary Alsworthy—although none of his friends seemed to think terribly much of her. The words "shallow flirt" had come up more than once. Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe's indiscretion might be my good fortune. In the throes of infatuation, wasn't it only logical that a man might reveal a little more than he ought? Especially over the course of a separation? If the War Office was sending Lord Pinchingdale off to Ireland, it made sense that he would continue to correspond with his beloved. And in the course of that correspondence…

Buoyed by my own theory, I scrolled down through a long list of Victorian Alsworthys, World War I Alsworthys, Alsworthys from every conceivable time period. For crying out loud, you'd think their name was Smith. The foot-shuffling man behind me gave up on shuffling and upped the level of unspoken aggression by conspicuously flipping through the ancient volumes of paper catalogs next to me. I was too busy scanning dates to feel guilty. Alsworthys, Alsworthys everywhere, and not a one of any use to me.

Or maybe not. My hand stilled on the scroll button as the dates 1784–1863 flashed by. I quickly scrolled back up, clumsily engaging in mental math. Take 1784 away from 1803…and you got eighteen. Um, I meant nineteen. This is why my checkbook never balances. Either way, it was an eminently appropriate age for an English debutante in London for the Season.

There was only one slight hitch. The name beside the dates wasn't Mary. It was Laetitia.

That, I assured myself rapidly, scribbling down the call number, didn't necessarily mean anything. After all, my friend Pammy's real first name was Alexandra, but she had gone by her middle name, Pamela, ever since we were in kindergarten, largely because her mother was an Alexandra, too, and it created all sorts of confusion. Forget all that rose-by-another-name rubbish. Pammy had been Pammy for so long that it was impossible to imagine her as anything else.

Behind me, the foot-shuffling man claimed my vacant seat with an air of barely restrained triumph. Prolonged exposure to the Manuscript Room does sad, sad things to some people.

I handed in my call slip to the man behind the desk and retreated to my own square of territory, nudging my plastic bag with my foot to make sure everything was still there. Between Mary and Laetitia…well, I would have chosen to be called Laetitia, but there was no accounting for taste. Maybe she got sick of dealing with variant spellings.

Except…I scowled at my empty manuscript stand. There was a Laetitia Alsworthy. Just to make sure, I scooted my computer to a more comfortable angle, and opened up the file into which I had transcribed my notes from Sussex. Sure enough, there it was. One Letty Alsworthy, who appeared to be friends with Lady Henrietta Selwick. Not close friends, I clarified for myself, squinting at my transcription of Lady Henrietta's account of her ballroom activities in the summer of 1803, but the sort of second-or third-tier friend you're always pleased to run into, have good chats with, and keep meaning to get to know better if only you had the time. I had a bunch of those in college. And, in its own way, the London Season wasn't all that different from college, minus the classes. You had a set group of people, all revolving among the same events, with a smattering of culture masking more primal purposes, i.e., men trying to get women into bed, and women trying to get men to commit. Yep, I decided, just like college.

Pleased as I was with my little insight, that didn't solve the problem that Letty was a real, live human being with an independent existence from her sister Mary. Her sister Mary who might have corresponded with Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe.

I should have known that Mary wouldn't be the writing type.

Behind me, the little trolley used to transport books from the bowels of the British Library to the wraiths who haunted the reading room rolled to a stop. Checking the number on the slip against the number on my desk, the library attendant handed me a thick folio volume, bound in fading cardboard, that had seen its heyday sometime before Edward VIII ran off with Mrs. Simpson.

Propping the heavy volume on the foam stand, I listlessly flipped open the cover. I had ordered it, so I might as well look at it. Besides, the computer in the back was now occupied, and I doubted its present occupant would show me any more mercy than I had shown him. A salutary lesson on "do unto others," and one that I was sure I would forget by lunchtime.

The documents at the front of the volume were far too late, Mitfordesque accounts of nightclub peccadilloes during the Roaring Twenties. I'd come across this kind of volume before, letters pasted onto the leaves of the folio with glorious unconcern for chronology, medieval manuscript pages sandwiched between Edwardian recipes and Stuart sermon literature. Otherwise known as someone cleaning out the family attic and shipping the lot off to the British Library. Checking the number I had scribbled down from the computer, I saw that it had marked the Laetitia Alsworthy material as running from f. 48 to f. 63, and then again from f. 152 on.

After lunch, I was really going to have to give in and call Mrs. Selwick-Alderly.

Turning by rote to page forty-eight, my hand stilled on the crackly paper. The letter pressed into the center of the page was short, only three lines. Despite its having been pasted into the folio quite some time ago, I could still make out the phantom impressions of two deep lines incised into the paper, one vertically, one horizontally, as though it had been folded into a very small square, the better for passing unseen from hand to hand. There was also a series of crinkles that prevented the paper from lying completely flat against the page, as though someone had crumpled it up with great force and then smoothed it out again.

But it was the signature that caught my attention. One word. One name.

Pinchingdale.

As in Geoffrey, Lord Pinchingdale. The signature was unmistakable. It most certainly wasn't Marmaduke. What on earth was he doing writing to Mary's sister? Forgetting about computer hogs and lunch plans and the way the wool of my pants rasped against my waist, I settled the folio more firmly on its stand and hunched over to read Lord Pinchingdale's short and peculiar note.

"All is in readiness. An unmarked carriage will be waiting for you behind the house at midnight…."