The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Twenty-Five

After the warm coziness of Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat, my own little gnome hole seemed even more desolate than usual.

The hall light had gone out again, leaving the blue-walled hallway in gloom, and the blue-carpeted stairs even gloomier. Juggling the caramel macchiato I’d picked up at the Starbucks next to the Bayswater Tube stop and the package under my arm, I picked my way downstairs, making a mental note to call the landlord about replacing the lightbulb before someone (that is, me) broke her neck on the stairs. I managed to insert key into lock on the third try, and blundered into my dark little entryway, fumbling for the light switch.

As furnished flats go, it wasn’t too dreadful. There wasn’t terribly much to it, just a narrow hallway with miniature kitchen appliances crammed against one wall, a tiny bathroom, and one rectangular room that tripled as living room, bedroom, and study. The conscientious owner had tried to brighten it up with cream-colored paint and flowered curtains and large landscapes of the Tuscan countryside. Unfortunately, the latter only emphasized the contrast between the Italian sunshine and the gray excuse for light that filtered through my scrap of window.

Dumping my coffee on the small, round table, and setting the plastic-wrapped package tenderly down on the bed, I toppled into a chair, and tackled my boots. The zipper on the left boot had gone stiff, probably in protest against the eternal rain. Another tug, and the zipper gave with that horrible tearing sound that anyone who has ever snagged a stocking knows all too well.

Ordinarily, I might have been mildly peeved about the untimely demise of my last pair of stockings. But my mind wasn’t on my wardrobe. Fueled by caffeine and caramel, it was replaying last night’s scene in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s kitchen in excruciating detail—the same way it had been doing since three this morning.

I’d tried to lose myself in Amy’s letters, but the papers kept drifting down towards the coverlet as I would stare off into space, coming up with the five-hundredth witty parting line I ought to have fired after Colin Selwick. It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only comes up with clever, cutting remarks long after the other party is happily slumbering away. Somehow, I figured storming into Colin’s bedroom, shaking him awake, and delivering my brilliant one-liner would only make me look more pathetic.

Besides, he might have gotten the wrong idea. To the male mind, female plus bedroom equals just one thing.

Colin hadn’t been about when I dragged myself blearily out of the guest bedroom at seven that morning, and stumbled kitchenwards. Instead, I’d found Mrs. Selwick-Alderly at the pine table, drinking a cup of tea and reading the Daily Telegraph.

I’d veered between disappointment and relief. Disappointment, because there went any chance of delivering those painstakingly crafted retorts. And relief, because I know what I look like at seven in the morning.

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had dropped her newspaper with flattering promptness, smilingly asking me how I’d slept, and pressed tea and toast upon me. I’d accepted the tea, declined the toast, and refrained from any mention of midnight encounters with her nephew. I wondered if she was going to bring up the presence of two chocolate-streaked mugs in the sink, but either she hadn’t noticed, or didn’t think it worth mentioning. Maybe Colin had midnight cocoa tête-à-têtes all the time.

Maybe I was being entirely ridiculous.

I gulped down my tea in record time.

“How are you finding our little archive?” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly asked, giving me a moment to recover from my burnt tongue.

“It’s unbelievable,” I said honestly. “I can’t thank you enough for letting me use it. But . . .”

“Yes?”

“Colin—I mean, your nephew . . .” Damn. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly was well aware that Colin was her nephew without my telling her so. I started again. “Why doesn’t he want me to have access to your papers?”

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly looked thoughtfully at the headline of the Telegraph. “Colin takes his position as guardian of the family heritage very seriously. What do you think of our Pink Carnation?”

“I haven’t found him yet. I’m only about halfway through the papers you gave me. The handwriting took some getting used to.”

“Amy’s handwriting is awful, isn’t it? Who do you think the Pink Carnation is?”

“Miles Dorrington seems like the best candidate.” I watched Mrs. Selwick-Alderly closely, hoping for a reaction; something to confirm or contradict my hunch.

I didn’t get one. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly went on calmly spreading marmalade on a piece of toast as she asked, “Why Miles?”

“The Pink Carnation’s first recorded escapade isn’t until late April of 1803. Miles is in constant contact with the Purple Gentian, so he knows everything that’s going on in Paris; he has all the resources of the War Office behind him in London; and”—I brought forth my best piece of evidence so far—“he’s in Paris in late April.”

“How did you discover that, if you’re only half finished?”

“I flipped ahead,” I confessed. “I saw his signature on a letter that was dated Paris, April thirtieth. So I know he’s at the right place at the right time.”

“What about Georges Marston?”

“After his assault on Amy?” I exclaimed incredulously.

“Nobility of deed isn’t always a sign of nobility of character,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said quietly. “Great men have been known to be brutes in private life.”

I made a face, resisting a five-year-old’s impulse to stamp my foot in protest. “Not the Pink Carnation,” I said firmly, trying to ignore the little trickle of unease that slithered down my spine like the snake along the tree of knowledge.

That would explain Colin’s reticence . . . the Pink Carnation, a would-be rapist. I banished the thought as an impossibility. Marston couldn’t be the Pink Carnation. If he were, we’d have heard something about him prior to April 1803; Marston had been in Paris for months, ever since his defection from the English army. Miles. It had to be Miles.

“. . . with you,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said.

“Pardon?”

Mrs. Selwick-Alderly repeated herself. I gaped in incomprehension.

“You can’t mean it.” That had just been an offer to take the manuscript home with me, hadn’t it? I tended to be a bit out of it in the morning, but not entirely delusional. I must have misheard.

“You must finish the story,” she said, folding her paper and putting it aside. “And then we can discuss whether the Pink Carnation lives up to all your expectations.”

“But what if I lost them?” I protested. “I might drop them on the Tube, or they might get damaged by the rain, or . . .”

“That sort of thinking,” Mrs. Selwick-Alderly said with great satisfaction, “is exactly why I have no hesitation about entrusting them to your care.”

After that, how could I argue? Especially when I wanted to finish reading those papers more than I wanted anything in my life. Retrieving the papers from her guest room, she had first placed them in their special, acid-free box, wrapped the box in a clean linen sheet from the airing cupboard, and folded the entire bundle into no fewer than seven thick plastic bags before placing the bulky package into a Fortnum’s carrier bag. They were on short-term loan—I was to return the pile the following day, presumably before Colin discovered they were missing.

The safety of the papers was one thing, but Colin Selwick’s obsession with secrecy was quite another. I was still smarting over his high-handed directive of the night before. Nothing goes beyond this flat, indeed!

I could understand not wanting his family’s name dragged through the muck of the tabloids—but what sort of scandal was big enough to catch the public’s attention two hundred years later? Maybe his great-great-great-grandfather, the Purple Gentian, had sold out to the French, and had been unmasked by the Pink Carnation, and that’s why Colin Selwick wanted to keep it all under wraps, I hypothesized. Even so, I couldn’t imagine that generating more than scholarly interest, or, at most, a couple of paragraphs towards the middle of the Mirror on a particularly slow news day. It wasn’t exactly stop-the-presses sort of stuff.

Besides, as far as I could tell from the documentation I’d been reading, the Purple Gentian was fanatically devoted to his cause. The worst I’d been able to discover about him was that he had played nasty games with the heart of Miss Amy Balcourt. Poor Amy. Reading that entry of her diary in the wee hours of dawn—just before my eyelids finally gave in to gravity and my body to sleep—I’d wanted to slug Lord Richard for her. And he had sounded so charming. But, then, they all did. Even Grant had been charming in the beginning.

Now, what was he still doing in my head? Out, out damned ex!

Scowling, I gulped down the remains of my coffee, and went to toss the empty paper cup in the trash. I dumped it into the bin with unnecessary force.

It wasn’t as though I was pining for Grant, I groused to myself as I stomped back over to the bed. Things had begun to go sour long before the advent of Alicia the art historian. For those last few months, we’d stayed together as much out of convenience as anything else, just because it would be too much trouble to find someone else to fill up those empty Friday nights.

I plopped down onto the flowered coverlet, and reached for the plastic-wrapped package. Unfortunately, I knew exactly what I was suffering from. LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.

My roommates and I had come up with the term in college, to explain the baffling phenomenon of nostalgia for one’s most recent ex. No matter how absolutely awful that person had been at the time, after a few weeks, the relationship would take on a rosy tint, and wistful little phrases would begin to creep into conversation, like, “I know he cheated on me with three people at the same time, but he was such a fabulous dancer,” or “All right, so he was a raging alcoholic, but when he was sober he did such sweet things! Remember those flowers he bought for me that one time?” Inexplicable, but inevitable. A few weeks of singledom render even the most inexcusable ex charming in retrospect.

Hence, LIPID syndrome. As everyone knows, lipids are fats, and fats are bad for you, and therefore ex-boyfriends must be avoided at all costs.

This is what comes of having a bio major as a roommate for four years.

The one sure way to fight off LIPID syndrome was to distract oneself. True, the only foolproof cure is a new relationship, thus knocking the LIPID back down the dating chain into harmless obscurity, but there are other, temporary diversions. Reading a novel, watching a movie, or delving into the private lives of historical characters.

With an anticipatory grin, I eased the bundle in my lap out of its first layer of wrappings, a green Harrods bag, and began slowly unwinding the next layer, a turquoise bag from the Fortnum & Mason Food Hall. I had just gotten down to layer three—another Harrods bag, relic of last year’s January sales—when my raincoat began bleating out a Mozart sonata.

Setting aside my bundle, I leaped for the vibrating pocket of my raincoat, yanking out my mobile just as it got to the third measure.

It was still only eight in the morning. Who would call at such an uncivilized hour? Mrs. Selwick-Alderly demanding the papers back? A furious Colin Selwick, accusing me of grand manuscript theft and threatening to sic Scotland Yard on me?

PAMMY, proclaimed the screen in capital letters.

I should have known.

Pammy and I had attended the same all-girls school in Manhattan until tenth grade, when Pammy’s parents split, and her English mother took off for London, Pammy in tow. But we’d kept in touch, first by scrawled schoolgirl letters on overly cutesy stationery, and later via marathon e-mail sessions. I loved her. I did. But Pammy was . . . Pammy. Over the top. Unique. About as sensitive as a construction crew. Not the person to tell about the Selwick saga.

For a moment I considered pushing the little red end-call button. But Pammy is a force of nature not to be denied. She’d only keep calling back till I gave in. I hit receive.

“Hi, Pammy.”

“What are you wearing tonight?” she demanded without preamble.

Oh, God, tonight. I’d completely forgotten. Damn. I knew I should never have picked up the phone.

Pammy, as she airily informed people at cocktail parties, did PR, which, as far as I could tell, involved throwing very expensive parties on other people’s tabs. Tonight’s extravaganza celebrated the launch of the Covent Garden store of a hot new designer, hot and new meaning that the clothes were all either tattered in mysterious places, or made from exotic materials like genuine imported Tibetan yak skin (dry clean only). Pammy, who tended to know about these things, swore he was the next Marc Jacobs. It would be, like all of Pammy’s parties, hot and crowded and filled with impossibly glamorous people with hip bones so sharp they could qualify as concealed weapons.

“Pammy, no; I can’t,” I moaned.

“Don’t even think of backing out,” she ordered. “If you don’t show tonight, I will personally march over to Bayswater and drag you out.”

She would, too. This was, after all, the same girl who had marched Andy Hochstetter over to me at a Goddard Gaities dance in sixth grade, and threatened to strangle him with his own tie if he wouldn’t dance.

“I’m really tired . . . ,” I hedged.

Pammy snorted. “So take a nap! It’s not like you have to go anywhere.”

Pammy had never grasped the concept that grad school actually required work.

“I have a ton of manuscripts to read. . . .”

“These people have been dead for five hundred years, Ellie. What does an extra day matter?”

Pammy had also never grasped the concept of time periods. I had given up trying to explain to Pammy that 1803 was only two hundred years ago, and, no, the Pink Carnation didn’t wear armor like the people in A Knight’s Tale.

“It’s not like it’s going to make any difference to them if—what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Since that last was followed by a screech of tires, it clearly wasn’t intended for me.

“Are you okay?” I shouted above the din of cursing motorists.

“Idiot drivers,” muttered Pammy, who’d nearly mown down three pedestrians driving me home from her flat two nights before. Her tone switched to wheedle mode. “Come on, Ellie, if you don’t go, you’re just going to sit alone in your flat feeling sorry for yourself. Wouldn’t you rather be out, doing something? It will be fun.”

“Fun,” I echoed flatly. Stick-thin models parading around in clothes that looked like something out of a surrealist painter’s disturbed dreams while the self-proclaimed glamorous screeched at each other over lukewarm glasses of champagne. Hmm, champagne. Pammy did generally order excellent alcohol.

Pammy scented weakness. “Good! It’s just a few blocks off the Covent Garden Tube stop . . .” Without pausing for breath she rattled off the address. “Did you get that?”

“No.”

“Ellie!”

I fetched pen and paper. One could sooner argue with a hurricane. “Repeat,” I directed.

By the time she was done, I’d covered two sides of a piece of notepaper. Knowing my propensity for getting lost, Pammy gave me what she calls Ellie directions: complicated lists of every single landmark in a ten-block radius of where I was supposed to be going. “If you see a Starbucks, you’ve gone too far,” she finished. “And I’ll have my mobile on. I probably won’t be able to hear it,” she added pragmatically, “but call if you get lost, and I’ll try to come out and find you.”

“No Starbucks . . . ,” I repeated, scribbling away. “Will anyone I know be there?”

Pammy rattled off a list of names, some of which I recognized from her previous parties, including her current crush, an investment banking type notable only for his surprisingly bright ties.

“And I’ve invited a few St. Paul’s people,” she finished, referring to the London private school she’d transferred to after leaving Chapin, “but I don’t think you’ve met any of them. Now,” she said briskly, having gotten the preliminaries out of the way, “what are you going to wear?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I admitted; Pammy’s parties were always impossible to dress for.

Phone pressed to my ear, I wandered over to the wardrobe, and regarded my limited London wardrobe. The sight that greeted me was uninspiring. Tweed, tweed, everywhere, as far as the eye could see. All right, so I’d taken the whole dressing-like-an-academic thing a little too much to heart.

“I can loan you something,” Pammy offered a little too promptly. “There’s the cutest little outfit I bought just the other day. . . .”

“What about my little black dress?” I countered, pushing past rows of herringbone and plaid.

“Ugh,” Pammy said eloquently. “It makes you look like a Chapin mother.”

Now that wasn’t fair. True, it was a classic little black sheath dress, but it was made of a soft, clinging fabric that draped in a way utterly inappropriate for a parent–teacher meeting. I’d bought it miraculously on sale at Bergdorf’s the previous winter, and it had become my cocktail fallback dress. Definitely not a Pammy sort of outfit, though.

As for what was a Pammy sort of outfit . . . “Listen, I’m going down into the Tube now, so we might be cut off. But how about this. All you need are two scarves. Just tie one around your chest as a top, and the other—”

Mercifully, the Tube yanked Pammy out of range before she could finish the thought. Even Scheherazade was allotted a few more layers than that.

Slamming the wardrobe doors shut, I retreated to the bed. I’d deal with the outfit issue later. With any luck, Pammy wouldn’t change her mind and decide to show up at eight o’clock with an outfit that she just knew would look fabulous on me. The last time she had attempted to dress me for a party, it had involved a red leather bustier. Enough said.

Plumping up my pillows, I fell gratefully back onto the bed, and regarded the plastic bundle from a prone position. Nap? Or manuscript? My body was definitely urging nap . . . but I found myself reaching for the manuscript anyway.

Just one or two pages of Amy’s diary, I promised my tired body. Just enough to find out what happened when she went to view Lord Richard’s antiquities.