The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

Prologue

November, 2003

The Vaughn Collection, London

"Four pounds," demanded the fourteen-foot-high statue of Hercules.

For such a big man, Hercules had a surprisingly high-pitched voice. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn't actually a piece of classical statuary demanding the contents of my wallet, but a very human-size woman seated at a small desk at its base. When you're confronted by a twice-larger-than-life statue of Hercules, wielding a club and wearing little more than a strategically draped serpent, you tend not to notice much else.

To be fair, it wasn't all Hercules' fault. I had spent the morning in a state of utter uselessness, nearly gotten run over by a cab on my way to the archives, and given a pair of confused German tourists directions to Westminster Abbey when what they wanted was Kensington Palace.

The cause of all this chaos and confusion? I had a date. A real, live date with a real, live boy.

If this doesn't seem exactly stop-the-presses sort of stuff, then you've clearly never experienced the soul-sucking self-doubt that comes of a year without so much as an attempted grope. And the boy in question…Think a blond Hugh Grant without the sketchy past, or Errol Flynn without the tights. Unlike my other exes (and most Robin Hoods), he actually spoke with an English accent. Which made sense, because he was English, born and bred on the scepter'd isle, as British as HP Sauce, crooked teeth, and the Queen Mum's hat collection. What single Anglophile of a certain age wouldn't be smitten?

In my own defense, I hadn't come to England looking for romance. As a fifth-year graduate student with an increasingly angsty dissertation advisor and a research grant that didn't quite pay my rent, I didn't have time for men — at least not live ones. Unfortunately, the dead ones could be just as frustrating as the live ones. After three months hunched over a desk in the British Library Manuscript Room, three months of endless train rides to obscure county records offices, three months of assuring my advisor that, yes, everything was going just brilliantly and of course I would have a chapter for him by January, by November I had still been no closer to my goal: the unmasking of the Pink Carnation, the flowery spy whose very existence gave Napoleon an intense allergic reaction.

The fact that a whole legion of intensely interested nineteenth-century French agents, as well as several successive generations of scholars, had also failed ought to have clued me in.

But when has that ever stopped anyone? It's like the search for the mines of Solomon or the Lost City of Gold; that no one else has found it before just adds to the challenge. I'm sure the men who perished in the jungles of Mexico didn't say, "Oooh, let's go die on a hopeless quest!" No, they dreamed of coming home draped in gold and covered with glory. My goal wasn't gold but footnotes, the coin of the scholarly realm. Otherwise the impetus was the same. The fact that many scholars smugly insisted that the Pink Carnation had never existed in the first place, that he was an imaginary folk hero invented to sell papers, or a sort of shadow puppet invented by the War Office in the hopes of scaring Napoleon, only spurred me on. I'd show them.

Or not. For a while, it was beginning to look like not.

But every now and again, once in a hundred years, despite all the nay-saying and the accumulated weight of scholarly truths, someone gets lucky. This time, it was me. I don't know what it was that made Mrs. Selwick-Alderly decide to allow me access to a cache of family papers never before open to the public. Perhaps I reminded her of a long-lost daughter. Or she might simply have taken pity on me for my pathetic and bedraggled air (I'm frequently bedraggled, and after three months of fruitless dissertation research, I was feeling pretty darn pathetic). Whatever the cause, in her cozy sitting room, I had found not only the secret identity of the Pink Carnation, but something more, something that came in a tall, blond, and, at that point in time, very irate package.

That's where Colin came in.

Ah, Colin. I was staring happily into space, contemplating the wonder that was Colin, when an annoying, squawking noise permeated my reverie.

"Four pounds," the receptionist repeated, clearly taking my blank stare for either a linguistic barrier or just chronic stupidity.

"Huh?" I said brilliantly, still mentally wandering hand in hand with Colin in a Technicolor wonderland complete with dancing munchkins. I was wearing a floaty frock that flitted daintily about my knees as Colin swung me in a happy circle beneath the cerulean sky. All that was missing was Dick Van Dyke, although, given the look in Colin's eye, Dick would have been decidedly superfluous.

Still tap-dancing through daydream, I favored the receptionist with a big, beaming smile.

"Oh, I'm not here for the museum," I said brightly, confirming her impression that a village somewhere back in the States was missing its idiot. "I'm here for the Vaughn Collection."

"This is the Vaughn Collection."

I knew I should have had that extra cup of coffee before leaving my flat. I thought of pretending that I didn't speak English, but it was a little too late for that.

"Sorry," I said, with that super-ingratiating smile that works on Americans but falls flat in the British Isles, "I didn't mean the art collection. I meant the documentary collection — the archives. I spoke to your archivist?"

I'm not sure why it came out as a question. After all, if I didn't know whether I'd spoken to the archivist, she surely wouldn't know, either. From the look on the receptionist's face, she seemed to share this opinion.

Trying a different tack, I said, more assertively, "I was told the archives were open between one and six on Saturdays."

Dismissing me as a bad job, the receptionist jerked her head to the right. "Straight through down the stairs at the back if you want to see the museum it'll be four pounds." The fact that she said this without pausing to draw breath rendered the performance even more impressive.

"I'll be sure to keep my eyes shut as I go."

This earned me another fishy stare. Deeming it wiser to quit while I was ahead, I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder and headed in the direction the receptionist had indicated. The caryatids arrayed on either side of the door looked down on my brown wool pants and baggy green Barbour jacket with a decided sneer. I don't know what they were so supercilious about; their marble draperies were a good two thousand years out of fashion.

Dotted with little glass cases, the room beyond must have been a ballroom or something equally grand once upon a time, when Vaughn House was still inhabited by genuine Vaughns rather than the remnants of their art collection and a scraggle of hardcore art historians and scruffy tourists. You could have fit five of my flat into it and still had room for a good-size coffee shop.

With a fine disregard for atmosphere, the curators had plunked a series of glass and chrome display cases throughout the room, each containing a motley collection of personal effects of long-deceased Vaughns. In the largest case, in the very center of the room, the curators had displayed the pièce de résistance, an impressive collection of Edwardian underwear, from lace-edged drawers large enough to swathe the backside of a baby elephant to a pair of stays that looked like they might have been used to tow the Queen Mary back into port. Next to them, the curators had helpfully positioned a sepia photograph of a formidable dowager with a waist cinched into nothingness and a bosom that could smother a small city.

With four months of fish and chips weighing heavily on my midriff, I cast a speculative eye over the stays. Unfortunately, I didn't think they would fit under my going-out pants, which were designed for something a bit lighter in the way of undergarments. I wondered what the curators of museums would be displaying a hundred years hence. Would we have glass cases filled with fire-engine-red thongs and leopard-print bras, along with a carefully printed white card explaining their sociocultural significance?

The gentleman who occupied the better part of one wall seemed to share my qualms. His gaze was fixed upon the underwear display with a decidedly jaundiced air. He had been painted, according to the conceit of the time, in a classical wasteland, with a broken pillar wedged beneath one elbow and vague suggestions of a decaying Roman temple in the background. It was an evening scene, in which the rich black brocade of his coat would have blended with the deep indigo of the night sky if not for the silver threads that ran through the weave like condensed moonlight. The entire ensemble had a supernatural shimmer reminiscent of old-fashioned ghost stories featuring family phantoms.

Even with all the shimmer and silver, it wasn't the eerie glow of his attire that first caught my eye, but his face. I would be lying if I said it was a handsome face. The nose was too long — the better for looking down at you, I suppose — and the lips were too thin. There were interesting hollows beneath his sharp cheekbones and paunches beneath his eyes, not unlike those one sees in pictures of the Duke of Windsor, the last word in aristocratic dissipation. His thin lips were curved in a cynical half-smile, and the sideways slant of the eyes suggested that he had just noticed something that both appalled and amused him — or amused him because it appalled him. Either way, I wanted to be let in on the joke.

The artist had chosen to color his eyes nearly the same shade as the silver that ran through his coat. The effect was unusual and arresting. Those silver eyes glinted with a sardonic amusement that even two centuries of hanging on a wall couldn't dim. He looked as though he had seen it all before, including the undergarments. He probably had. Those slender hands, elegantly poised on the head of an ebony walking stick, seemed more than capable of unlacing a pair of stays in about three minutes flat.

I didn't need to read the swirly script on the brass plaque affixed to the frame to know who he was.

Sebastian, Lord Vaughn, eighth Earl Vaughn, Baron Vaughn of Vaughn-on-Tweed, and a host of lesser titles, all of which nicely filled up the space of half a page in Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage. A grand Whig aristocrat of the old school, member of organizations as diverse as the Royal Society and the Naughty Hellfire Club, intellectual and wastrel — and quite possibly a French spy.

I had come across Lord Vaughn in a number of highly suspicious circumstances. His name kept popping up in the annals of the Pink Carnation. Wherever he appeared, he brought with him death, destruction, and a devastating way with a quizzing glass.

The first time Vaughn's name had intruded upon my notes, it was in connection with the death of an operative of the War Office, who had been placed in Vaughn's household as a footman. No one ever really explained that one. The assumption was that the footman had been murdered by the Marquise de Montval, the deadly French operative who worked for the even deadlier Black Tulip (and by the time you've gotten to two levels of deadly, you're talking pretty deadly).

Did I mention that the Marquise had been Vaughn's mistress? The association might have been purely amorous — or it might not have been. It was Vaughn who had released the Marquise from the custody of the English War Office, and Vaughn in whose company she had traveled to Ireland to foment rebellion on behalf of France. In short, Vaughn was looking pretty darn suspect. Add to that a decidedly sinister manner of dress, an extended stay on the Continent, and rather flippant ideas about the value of King and country, and you had a likely candidate for Traitor of the Year.

I had been thrilled when I discovered that the choice art museum, the Vaughn Collection, had belonged to that Vaughn. I'd heard of the Vaughn Collection — it had been prominently featured in my guidebook as a must-see for the serious student of art along with the Wallace Collection and the Sir John Soane's Museum — but it took a while for the connection to click. Vaughn, after all, was a fairly common name.

But while Vaughn was a fairly common name, there weren't all that many Vaughns with family mansions in snooty Belliston Square. In fact, there was only one. By a miracle, Vaughn House had remained in the family, escaping both the Blitz and bankruptcy, until the twelfth earl had left instructions in his will for its conversion into a public museum upon his death, apparently for the sole purpose of irritating his children. From what I was able to make out on the Web site, the bulk of the Vaughn Collection had been acquired by Sebastian, Lord Vaughn — my Vaughn — who seemed to have made his way across the Continent by buying up everything in his path.

A cover for other activities? Or merely the acquisitive instincts of a born connoisseur? I intended to find out. At least, I hoped to find out. Whether I would or not was another story entirely.

I hadn't been entirely honest with my new buddy, the receptionist. It hadn't been the archivist I had spoken with on the phone the day before, but a sort of assistant. He had sounded utterly baffled by my wanting to visit the collection. This did not inspire me with confidence.

The archives, he had informed me, around a yawn, were mostly documents establishing provenance of the artwork and all that sort of thing. There were, he allowed, some family papers still floating around. Yes, he thought there might be some from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. He supposed if I really wanted to come see them…The implication, of course, being that any sane person would rather spend a Saturday afternoon watching a cricket match, or watching paint dry, which amounts to much the same thing, as far as I've been able to tell. The whole conversation had been pretty much the professional equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting, "Nobody's home!"

Between the receptionist and the guy I had spoken to on the phone, I got the impression that the Vaughn Collection wasn't awfully keen on visitors. Which is a little counterproductive when you're a museum. I was fervently hoping that the archivist's assistant's attitude (I dare you to say that three times fast) was born more of laziness than of the fact that there just plain wasn't anything there.

I did have at least one other option. The Vaughns hadn't donated their family papers to the British Library, or printed up one of those nineteenth-century compilations with all the good bits expurgated. They did still own a rather impressive family seat up in the wilds of Northumberland, currently operating as a leisure center for corporate trainings — the sort of retreats that involve dumping people in a lake and giving them points for how efficiently they get out of it again and other such acts of socially sanctioned torture. The family documents might still be housed up there, but even with the miracles of modern transportation, Northumberland was a ways away. Depending on how things went with Colin…

Ah, Colin.

Dodging through the obstacle course of glass display cases, I shook my head at my own foolishness. If I turned into a useless blob of goo every time I thought of him, how was I ever going to maintain a coherent conversation for the duration of dinner?

Every time I relaxed my concentration, there I was again, off in daydream land, in a glorious summer landscape with a man as perfect and plastic as a Ken doll. I knew I was being absurd. Outside, it was late November, bitter cold November, only three days after Thanksgiving. Yet, in my daydreams, we strolled hand in hand beneath a gentle June sun while the birds chirped away in the trees above. In real life, one of them would probably crap on his head. So much for romance.

Logically, I knew that the man was just as imaginary as the scene. The Colin I knew — or, rather, the Colin I had met, since I couldn't really presume to know him at all, despite a rather intense acquaintance to date — was far from perfect. In fact, he was mercurial to the point of being schizophrenic, warm and flirty one minute, cold and distant the next. When I'd first met him, he'd practically bitten my head off for having the nerve to accept his aunt's invitation to go through the family archives; the next thing I knew, he was refilling my champagne glass and looking at me in a way that made me go all wobbly (although four glasses of champagne will do that to a girl).

At least he'd had an excellent excuse for his most recent Jekyll and Hyde performance. What I'd thought was a case of Colin simply blowing me off because of, well, me, turned out to be a panicked rush to Italy, where his mother was unconscious in a hospital after a particularly nasty car accident. I hadn't even realized Colin had a mother.

Naturally, I knew he must have had one at some point (yes, we all took sixth-grade bio class), but in novels, heroes never seem to have parents, at least not living, breathing ones who get sick or have accidents. Occasionally they have parent issues, but the parents are always conveniently off somewhere to stage left, usually dead. Can you imagine Mr. Rochester trying to explain to his mother how he burned the house down? Or Mr. Darcy promising his mother he won't marry that hideous Bingley girl? I rest my case.

Even writing off Colin's last mood swing, I still hadn't found out just why he had reacted quite so violently to my excursions into his family's archives. Most of the hypotheses that occurred to me were far too ridiculous to countenance. Even if Colin's great-great-grandparents had founded a sort of spy school on the family estate, there was no way that the family could have remained continuously in the spying business since the Napoleonic Wars.

Could they? My notions of modern espionage had a lot to do with James Bond movies, complete with low-slung cars, talking watches, and women in bikinis with breasts like helium balloons. Colin drove a Range Rover and wore a Timex. As for the helium balloons, let's just say that if that's what Colin was looking for, he wouldn't be going out to dinner with me.

Occupied by these fruitful speculations, I managed to make my way through the series of linked rooms that led to the back of the house, which petered out into a narrow corridor: Someone had painted the walls a utilitarian white that somehow managed to look more depressing than an outright gray.

There was a door with a big sign on it that read PRIVATE in all capital letters in four languages (presumably, if you didn't speak English, German, French, or Japanese, this prohibition didn't apply to you), with a rope strung across the entrance for emphasis. I cleverly deduced that that was not the door I was looking for.

An anemic red arrow pointed visitors down a narrow flight of stairs with shiny reflective tape beginning to peel back from the treads. Clutching the warped handrail, I picked my way carefully down and came straight up against — the bathrooms. The little stick figures were unmistakable.

Next to them, however, a plain white door had been marked with the word REFERENCE. It was just the tiniest bit ajar, presumably for ventilation rather than hospitality. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and made my way in, the heels of my boots slapping hollowly across the linoleum floor.

In contrast to all the gilt and rosewood upstairs, the reference room wasn't a very impressive setup. The room was small and square, furnished with two rickety aluminum folding tables, each supplied with four equally rickety folding chairs with hard plastic seats. Padding might have encouraged people to linger. At the far end of the room, a small counter, not unlike those in drugstores, separated the reference room from the archives beyond. Through the gap I caught a tantalizing glimpse of utilitarian metal shelves piled with a variety of acid-free boxes and big black binders.

At the desk, a man in a hot pink T-shirt guarded the gap. I use the word "guarded" loosely. He was so deeply absorbed in whatever he was reading that I could have vaulted over the desk without his noticing me. The thought was tempting, but that kindergarten training dies hard. I didn't vault. Instead I coughed. When that didn't work, I coughed again. Loudly. I was afraid I was going to have to resort to more drastic measures — like sneezing — but the third cough finally broke through his literary absorption. As he hoisted himself up, I took a peek at his reading material. It was a copy of Hello! magazine, open to a fine showing of airbrushed celebrities.

Somehow, I didn't think this was the archivist. In fact, I had a pretty shrewd guess as to who he was.

"I believe we spoke on the phone," I said.

Clearly, he also remembered our conversation fondly. His face went from lascivious to hostile in the space of a second. "Oh. You."

So much for being a goodwill ambassador for America, or whatever else it is that the Fulbright people expect you to do. Fortunately, my grant was a Clive fellowship, not a Fulbright, so I was off the hook. As far as I could tell, Mr. Clive had harbored no pretensions about his grantees fostering international amity.

That being the case, I felt no guilt at all about saying crisply, "I'm here to see the papers of Sebastian, Lord Vaughn."

The boy gave me a look as though to say, "You would." Levering himself up with obvious effort, he trudged wearily off into the blazing desert sands, five hundred miles across rugged terrain, to the metal shelves right behind the desk. There, he made a great show of studying the labels on the binders.

"That's Vaughn, v-a-u-g-h-n," I said helpfully. "Sebastian, Lord Vaughn."

"Which one?" asked Pink Shirt dourly.

It had never occurred to me that there might be other Sebastian, Lord Vaughns floating around. "There's more than one?"

"1768 or 1903?"

It was a bit like ordering a hamburger. "1768."

After a moment, his head popped back around again. "Do you want the 1790 box, the 1800 box, or" — his head ducked back down for a moment — "the everything else box?"

Next, he was going to ask me if I wanted fries with that. I made my choice, and the 1800 box was duly shoved into my hands. The tape on one end bore a label that descriptively stated, "Seb'n, Ld. Vn., Misc. Docs. 1800–1810."

I began to wonder if the archivist actually existed, or if they just pretended they had one for the sake of show. Not only was that one of the less convincing classificatory systems I had ever encountered, there had been no effort made to put the contents of the box in any sort of order; small notebooks, loose papers, and packets of letters were all jumbled, one on top of the other. Given that Vaughn had lived well into the reign of Victoria, my hunch was that the everything else box wasn't so-called because there wasn't much there for the next forty years of his life, but simply because no one had gotten around to sorting through it yet.

Settling myself down at the more stable of the two tables, I reached for the first packet in the 1800 box, gingerly unwinding the string that bound the letters. There's nothing like peering into someone else's correspondence. You never know what you might find. Coded messages, plotting skullduggery, passionate letters from a foreign amour, invitations to a late assignation…These turned out to fit none of the categories above. They were all from Vaughn's mother.

What was this with everyone having a mother all of a sudden?

Shoving my hair back behind my ears, I skimmed through the letter on the top of the pile. After one letter, I decided I liked Vaughn's mother. By the end of three, I really liked Vaughn's mother, but reading about Vaughn's spinster cousin Portia who had run off with a footman ("She might at least have picked a handsome one," opined Lady Vaughn) wasn't getting me any nearer to ascertaining the identity of the Black Tulip, so I reluctantly put the pile aside for future perusal and dug back into the box.

I toyed with the notion of Lady Vaughn herself as the Black Tulip, spinning her webs from the safety of Northumberland as she sent out her minions to do her dirty work. Sadly, it didn't seem the least bit probable. From her letters, Lady Vaughn was far too busy bullying the vicar and terrifying her family to be bothered with international espionage. Another great opportunity wasted.

I flipped quickly through the usual detritus of a busy life. There were love letters (using that term broadly); invitations to routs and balls and Venetian breakfasts; an extensive correspondence with his bankers (which generally seemed to boil down to "send more money"), and, at the very bottom of the box, tucked away where one might never have noticed it, a nondescript black book.

It wasn't a little black book in the modern sense. There was no list of addresses, conveniently labeled, MEMBERS OF THE LEAGUE OF THE BLACK TULIP (LONDON BRANCH). But the reality was nearly as good. I had found Lord Vaughn's appointment book. All of Lord Vaughn's movements, recorded in his own hand. His writing was just like his appearance, elegant, but with a sharp edge to it. I paged rapidly through it until I hit 1803, watching the place-names change from the exotic (Messina, Palermo, Lisbon) to the familiar (Hatchards, Angelo's, Manton's). Vaughn, I noted, had had a particularly close and personal relationship with his tailor; he saw him nearly once a week.

I was ruffling lazily through, wondering idly if I could make something out of those tailor appointments (there had, after all, been a round of spies rousted out of a clothiers establishment the year before), when a familiar name struck my eye: Sibley Court.

Sibley Court…I knew I had encountered that name before. After a moment staring into space, it finally clicked. Sibley Court was the family seat of the Viscounts Pinchingdale.

I bolted upright in my uncomfortable chair. Viscount Pinchingdale, at least the Viscount Pinchingdale in possession of the title in 1803, had been second in command of the League of the Purple Gentian, from which he moved on to aiding in the endeavors of the Pink Carnation. He was no fan of Lord Vaughn.

What might the potential Black Tulip be doing at the family seat of a known agent of England?

Well, that was a silly question. Spying, one presumed.

I would never know one way or another unless I read on. The entry was terse, but it was enough for a start. Especially once I recognized the names involved, including that, prominently featured, of Miss Jane Wooliston, otherwise known (although not to many) as the Pink Carnation.

14 Oct., 1803. Sibley Ct., Gloucestershire. Immured in Elizabethan horror in G'shire. Forced to play hunt the slipper with Dorrington and wife. Selwick going on about days of glory in France. Interesting proposition made to me by Miss Wooliston…