The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Fifteen

Richard paused outside the window of Edouard de Balcourt’s study, tugging the hood of his black cloak further down around his face. He always felt deuced silly in this getup. Black breeches, black shirt, black cloak, black mask . . . It was the sort of outfit worn by pretentious highwaymen with names like the Shadow or the Midnight Avenger, who hoped to be written up in the illustrated papers with lines like, “His heart is of the same unrelieved black as his clothes. . . .” Ugh. If the black weren’t so bloody useful for blending into the night, Richard would have been much happier carrying out his missions in buff breeches. Besides, the mask tickled the bridge of his nose. Who ever heard of a sneezing spy?

Giving his nose one last good wriggle, Richard set his mask straight, and eased open the library window. The drapes had been left open, and unless Balcourt were lying on the floor in the dark—an image which boggled Richard’s excellent imagination—the study was clearly deserted. Good. He would have time to do a little scouting and hide himself properly before Balcourt and Marston met for their rendezvous. If Richard had timed it right, it should be roughly a quarter to twelve. From what he knew of Balcourt, he was just the sort of hackneyed individual who was bound to hold any clandestine meeting just at the stroke of midnight. Hell, if Balcourt were a spy, he would probably enjoy wearing all black.

That was one thing Balcourt had in common with his sister—an instinct for drama.

Grasping the windowsill in both hands, Richard hoisted himself up and into the room, just managing not to get his legs tangled in his cloak. He wobbled a bit as he landed on the squishy cushions of the window seat, hopping down onto the floor rather more rapidly than he had intended.

Richard scanned the room. The recessed windows with their thick velvet drapes would be his line of retreat if he heard footsteps in the hall. A desk, a small table bearing a brandy decanter, a standing globe . . . the furnishings of the room, while expensive, were few. How could a man have a study without bookshelves? The bibliophile in Richard was appalled. The only reading matter of any kind apparent in Edouard Balcourt’s study was a pile of well-thumbed fashion papers featuring the latest in waistcoats.

The obvious place to look would be the desk. But this desk was a spindly affair, little more than a glorified table, with room for only one narrow drawer. Besides, Balcourt might not be the brightest frog in the pond, but even he couldn’t possibly be dim enough to store evidence of illicit activities in his desk.

Of course, Delaroche stored his most sensitive files in his desk—or, rather, had stored his most sensitive files in his desk, Richard amended with a smug smile—but to be fair to Delaroche, he had done so on the assumption that the Ministry of Police was impenetrable, not out of rank stupidity.

If not the desk, then where?

Balcourt had hung paintings above his desk and above the table on the far side of the room. Both gleamed with newness. There had been no time for dust to colonize the curlicues in the gilded frames, nor were the surfaces of the paintings themselves dulled by sunlight or grime. In most of his investigations, Richard followed the rule that anything conspicuously new was automatically suspect. Trust Balcourt to be difficult. Everything in the study was conspicuously new. The desk, with brass sphinxes’ heads inlaid into the wood of the legs, couldn’t be more than a year old, if that, and the small table bearing the decanter, aside from being too thin to boast a false bottom, was clearly from the same workshop. Even the mantelpiece on the fireplace was a recent addition.

In fact, in the entire room, the only object not new, fashionable, and, to Richard’s mind, unpardonably ugly was the globe standing in the corner of the room, between the table and the window. There had been just such a globe in the library at Uppington Hall when Richard was young. Due to Richard’s habit as a beastly eight-year-old of spinning the globe as fast as he could make it go for the joy of seeing the countries blur into multicolored blobs, the Uppington Hall library globe was no more. It had spun off its moorings, smashed out the window, and ended its existence by bouncing into an ornamental fountain under the shocked gaze of a marble water maiden. Richard had been confined to paper maps for years.

It was with a certain amount of eight-year-old glee that Richard approached Balcourt’s globe.

Wrapping his fingers around the contours of the globe, Richard lifted it up off its stand and shook it. And shook it again, thrilling to the unmistakable swish of paper. Rather a lot of paper, unless he missed his guess. Huzzah!

His fingers probed for the catch, and he had just found a suspicious bump somewhere along the equator when Richard heard a bump of an entirely difference kind. And a noise that sounded curiously like the word “ouch.”

Dash it all, Balcourt wasn’t actually lying on the floor in the dark, was he?

Richard immediately dismissed the ridiculous thought. Balcourt’s voice might be squeaky, but he wasn’t a eunuch. Richard stood very still, weighing his options. That might not have been an ouch at all. It might have been a squeaky floorboard, or a mouse. Yet, if there were even the slightest chance of it being a human voice, the sensible thing to do was to dive out the window and make his escape before he was seen.

Being a sensible man, Richard intended to do just that.

He was quite surprised to hear his own voice whisper, in French, “Who’s there?”

And he was even more surprised when a voice answered, in the same language, “Don’t worry! It’s just me. Ouch!”

“Just me,” Richard repeated stupidly. A small and all-too-familiar figure was wriggling its way out from under the desk. “Dratted furniture!” he heard it mutter in English, as first a dark head and then a pair of shoulders slithered partway out. “Oh, blast, my hem’s caught.” The head disappeared again under the desk.

Too incredulous even to be angry, Richard stalked over to the desk, grabbed a pair of slim forearms, and pulled. There was a slight tearing sound, and out popped a rather disheveled Miss Amy Balcourt.

Amy didn’t yelp as the Purple Gentian dragged her out from under her brother’s desk. She didn’t even wince when her knee scraped against the carpet. She was too busy staring unabashedly at the Purple Gentian.

The Purple Gentian was here, in the flesh, in her brother’s study. True, not much flesh was revealed by the long black gloves, black mask, black pants, black cloak, and black hood, but two very lively eyes blazed through the holes of his mask, and his black-garbed chest rose and fell with his somewhat uneven breathing.

Despite her confident words to Jane earlier—one had to be confident with Jane, or else she logicked one to the point of despair—Amy had feared that her sojourn under the library desk would go unrewarded, unless one counted the gleaning of a fine crop of dust. The Purple Gentian, savior of royalists, scourge of the French, had haunted her daydreams for so long that it seemed scarcely possible that he could appear in any form more material than that of a phantom.

But here he was, real, alive, from his scuffed boots to the expression of shocked outrage on his shadowed face. Amy didn’t even have to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming because the Gentian, unintentionally, had undertaken that task for her. The grip of his gloved fingers on her upper arms was painfully tight. Amy wiggled a bit in the Gentian’s grasp as she began to lose feeling in her fingers.

“Um, do you think you could put me down?” Amy asked in French.

“What? Oh.” He seemed to have pulled just a bit too far; although he was still holding Amy by the arms, she was now dangling six inches off the floor. Richard hastily set her down. “Sorry.”

“That’s quite all right.” Amy shook out her skirts and flashed him a smile that dazzled even through the moonlit darkness of the study.

“May I inquire as to what you were doing under that desk?”

“Waiting for you,” Amy said brightly, as if that were all the explanation that was needed. “You are the Purple Gentian, aren’t you?”

“Don’t you think it would be rather foolish of me to answer that question?” Richard asked dryly.

“Only if you fear that I might have the secret police stashed away behind the curtains.” Impulsively, Amy grabbed one of his gloved hands and led him to the closed curtains of the other window and flung them open. She twirled to face him. “See? No Fouché, no Delaroche. You’re perfectly safe.”

Standing far closer to Amy than propriety would have ever allowed, in her brother’s darkened, deserted study, Richard had his doubts about that statement. It would be so easy to lean just the slightest bit forward, to brush that unruly curl out of her eye, to cup her face with his hands. . . . Richard pulled back, away from Amy; if he couldn’t make her leave, he would feign departure and lurk under the windowsill.

“You’re not planning to leave! I’ve been under that desk for ages waiting to speak to you.”

Amy fervently hoped that he wasn’t considering a rapid leap out of the window. While she could grab on to the end of his cloak and refuse to let go, somehow, that wasn’t the way she had envisaged her first meeting with the Gentian progressing. Bad enough to have him haul her out from under the desk—blasted hem!—when she so desperately needed to impress him with her intrepid espionage abilities.

“I want to help you,” she said eagerly.

“Help me?”

Amy chose to ignore the skepticism in the Gentian’s tone. “Yes! I could be a great help to you! I have an entrée into the palace—I’ll be giving Bonaparte’s daughter English lessons. No one except you knows I can speak French, so they’ll talk freely in front of me and I can overhear all sorts of useful things. I’m not squeamish and I’m excellent at disguises and—”

“No.” The Gentian stalked rapidly towards the window. “It’s out of the question.”

“Why?” Amy darted after him. “Do you not trust me? At least give me a trial! Let me do something to prove myself! If I fail, I’ll go away, I promise, and you’ll never hear from me again.”

Richard paused, arrested by echoes of his own voice nearly a decade ago. He had stood there in Percy’s study, pleading with him, begging him, promising anything at all for the chance to go on just one mission.

Richard’s face hardened. It really wasn’t the same thing at all, he decided. True, he had only been a little older than Amy at the time, but he rode, he boxed, he fenced, and, damn it, he wasn’t a tiny female who could be flung over the shoulder of the first lout who happened along.

How could he let Amy wander off on missions on her own? She had said she was excellent at disguises. Imagining Amy roaming the streets of Paris dressed as a highly unconvincing boy made Richard’s blood run cold. Amy might be fine-boned, but Richard had conducted a thorough inspection of her form—in the interest of her safety, of course—and it was eminently clear that the curves so helpfully revealed by her scooped neckline could not easily be compressed into male proportions.

“Wouldn’t you be happier practicing your embroidery?” Richard suggested irritably.

“Embroidery?”

“Or you could always take up an instrument.” Richard tried to herd Amy towards the door. “Why don’t you go see if there’s a harp in the music room?”

“Are you trying to fob me off?”

There didn’t seem to be any point in denying it. “Yes.”

Amy planted her hands on her hips and looked the Gentian firmly in the eye—or, rather, in the mask. “You don’t seem to understand. I came to France for the express purpose of joining your League. This isn’t some silly whim. Unlike some people, who flit about the continent and consort with the enemy . . .”

Like Lord Richard Selwick, Amy added mentally.

Like me, Richard specified, with an inward smile. So she was still brooding about that, was she?

“. . . I take the plight of France very seriously, and I intend to do something about it.”

“An unusual interest for an English debutante.”

“Most English debutantes,” Amy explained with a wry twist of the lips, “don’t have a father who died on the guillotine. I do. And I intend to make sure his death does not go unavenged.”

Something about her demeanor killed the flippant reply that had rested on Richard’s lips. “Your father,” he said instead, “might consider it a greater tribute for his daughter to live long and happily. A spy cannot hope for either.”

“My parents were robbed of long and happy life by the Revolution.”

“All the more reason for you to aspire to both.”

“How could I live long and happily knowing that their murderers prosper?” Amy’s hands clenched into passionate fists. “I have spent my entire life in training for this moment! You can’t just turn me away with platitudes about playing the harp and living a happy life.”

Damn, thought Richard, who had fervently hoped to do just that.

Amy took a deep breath, and tried to school her voice into a calmer tone.

“All I ask is one chance. Is that so unreasonable?”

“Yes. It is.” The Purple Gentian seized Amy by the shoulders and marched her over to the mirror over the fireplace. “You”—he pointed at her image in the glass—“are a girl.”

“That’s not exactly an original observation.” Amy squirmed out of his grasp. “And besides, I really don’t see what that has to do with the matter at hand. I—”

“It has everything to do with the matter at hand,” the Gentian cut her off. “Don’t you realize the sort of risk you’d be putting yourself into?”

“No more than you do every time you undertake a mission. I understand the danger. And I’m not worried. Really.”

The Gentian’s gloved hands flexed impatiently. “Well, you ought to be. You shouldn’t even be here now! It can only be termed criminally idiotic of you to be alone, in the dark, with a man whose identity is entirely unknown to you. With any man, for that matter,” he ground out.

“But your identity is known to me. You’re the Purple Gentian! And if it’s propriety that you’re worried about, who is there to see us? As long as no one knows you’re here, my reputation is perfectly safe. And I’m certainly not telling.”

Richard resisted the urge to drive a fist into the wall. “God, Amy, your naïveté is terrifying!”

Neither of them noticed that he had used her first name.

“I am not naïve,” she said stiffly. “Unless it’s naïve to weigh all the evidence and come to a reasonable conclusion. I’ve read about everything you’ve done. Everything! You’ve always been the very soul of honor. Why would you do so much good for so many people only to behave ill towards me? Is that naïve?”

“Yes,” said the Gentian sharply. “And what proof do you have that I am the Purple Gentian? I could be a bloody highwayman for all you know.”

“I felt your ring.”

“You what?”

“I felt your ring. When I took your hand, when you first came in. I could feel the shape of the flower engraved on your signet ring through your glove. After all,” she added smugly, “there was no other way I could be sure it was you. I am not quite so naïve as you think.”

“Minx!” the Gentian exclaimed with grudging admiration. “Subtle, too. I had no idea what you were about.”

“That’s because I didn’t intend you to.” Amy basked in his approbation. “Does this mean . . . have I passed?”

Richard closed his eyes. Damn, damn, damn. If he were intelligent, he would leave now, before this ridiculous conversation went any further. Only, given the determined set of Amy’s jaw, she would probably try to follow him. Just what he needed: Amy blundering after him down the midnight alleyways of Paris.

He could solve the problem by making her despise him. He could mock her ambitions, belittle her abilities, dwell crudely upon her physical attributes. Within ten minutes, rather than begging him to stay, Amy would be pushing the Purple Gentian headfirst out the window with a boot in his back for good measure. All he had to do was make her hate him.

He couldn’t do it.

“I am losing my mind,” muttered Richard.

“What was that you said?” Amy asked hopefully.

Ping! Ping! Ping! The china clock on the mantelpiece rocked alarmingly on its base as its high-pitched chimes rang out the hour.

Amy froze.

“Midnight,” Richard said grimly. Blast! If his suspicions were right, Balcourt could be here at any moment.

The last chime of the clock was still reverberating through the room when it was replaced by a very different sort of sound. An uneven series of clumps and thuds filtered softly through the closed French doors. Just on time, Richard thought dourly, listening to the footfalls on the flagstones of the courtyard. Not only Edouard Balcourt, by the sound of it, but a whole series of booted feet.

Damn. He couldn’t allow himself to be found here. Even if Balcourt wasn’t an agent for Bonaparte, Richard’s presence in his study, at midnight, in the company of his young and nubile sister, would be bloody hard to explain.

Swift action was required. So Richard acted. Swiftly.

Grabbing Amy’s arm, Richard pulled her with him behind the curtains of the window seat.