The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

Chapter Five

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, sending my pencil skidding clear across the page. Fortunately, it was my notebook page rather than Lord Vaughn's appointment book. I glanced up irritably, one arm still shielding the page I'd been working on, like a fifth grader in a French exam.

The man in front of me embodied the essence of officialdom. Despite the fact that it was a Saturday, he wore a sport coat that was just a matching pair of pants short of being a suit. His dark hair was going gray at the temples in a way that might have come out of a packet labeled FOR THAT DISTINGUISHED LOOK. Even his tie fit the image, a conventional deep blue scattered with dozens of tiny shields that undoubtedly ought to have signified the identity of an august institution if I only were properly up on the iconography of the English educational system.

"I'm sorry to have startled you," he began. That struck me as a remarkably silly comment, considering that the whole point of tapping someone is to startle them. "I'm Nigel. Nigel Dempster."

Ah, the missing archivist. So much for my stern librarian with the pince-nez on her bony bosom.

"I'm Eloise. Eloise Kelly." He did seem to be standing there for a reason, so I began haphazardly piling up my papers. "I'm sorry if I've overstayed. I wasn't sure what the hours would be on a Saturday…."

"No, no, nothing like that." Dempster held out a soothing hand, which went admirably with the strips of gray in his hair. I relapsed back into my metal chair as he cast an unfavorable look at the now-empty desk at the back of the room. "I only regret that I wasn't here when you arrived." His nose twitched like a cat's whiskers. "I really must apologize for Rob. He is still in the process of being trained."

Next, he was going to say that it was so hard to find good help nowadays.

He didn't. But I could tell he was thinking it.

Instead, he tilted his head towards the jumbled mass of documents in the box in front of me. "Rob mentioned to me that you had asked for Sebastian, Lord Vaughn."

"Was I not supposed to?" I cast an anguished glance in the direction of the ecru box. The papers hadn't looked particularly frail, but every institution had its own peculiar rules. It's all part of the fun of historical research. At the Bodleian, before even letting me near a manuscript, they had made me recite a little pledge that sounded remarkably like the Pledge of Allegiance, only involving not ripping, scarring, immolating, or otherwise violating the documents for which they stood, so help me God. It would be too cruel to have known those papers existed and then have to give them back — or wait endless months for the proper forms and permissions to be processed. I wanted them, and I wanted them now.

"No, no," he said, and I began breathing again. "We do have some earlier papers that are in a much worse state. Those we loan out only in microfiche."

I nodded knowingly, trying to repress the impulse to grab the box and bolt. "But these are perfectly capable of being handled, right?"

Instead of answering my question, he surveyed his fiefdom with all the pride of a Norman knight with his very first keep. "This is a new project, you know. The Vaughn Collection's primary mission has always been the care and preservation of the objets d'art accumulated by the Vaughn family." He conscientiously rolled the r in art.

"It is a pretty amazing collection up there," I said, surreptitiously scooting my notebook closer to me, like a stallion at the starting gate. Ready, set…only the blasted man didn't go.

Instead, he shook his distinguished head with a practiced look of professional resignation. "The written records, except when needed for matters of provenance, were sadly neglected. When I started here last year, the records room was a shambles."

"You've done an incredible job," I lied. Always be polite to archivists. It was one of the first principles my advisor had pounded into me in my first-year research seminar. A little flattery never hurts, either. "The catalogue at the BL isn't half this accurate."

"It isn't, is it?" If he had been a woman, he would have patted his hair. Being a man, he just preened a bit, touching a hand to his already perfectly straight tie. "We do have a much smaller source base," he said modestly, showing no inclination to move. "Although several of the Vaughns did keep up a very broad correspondence."

"I'm sure they did," I said glumly. Occasionally, flattery backfired. I braced myself for a lengthy disquisition on the Hon. Miss Arabella Vaughn (1868–1918) and her raptures over the loveliness of the seaside. [N.B. There is no Arabella Vaughn, honorable or otherwise. I just made her up for illustrative purposes. Historians aren't really supposed to do that, but we always do, anyway.]

"Sebastian was one of the most prolific," he added, with a nod towards my work.

Thank goodness it wasn't Arabella. "I hadn't realized you were on first-name terms. I got the impression that Lord Vaughn wasn't on first-name terms with anyone at all, including himself."

That went right over his head. He gave me a hearty smile that stopped just short of being a pat on the head. "One gets a very strong sense of his personality after working with his papers."

"That one does," I agreed, just as heartily. "He's quite the character."

"What brings you to our Sebastian?"

"I'm doing research for my doctoral dissertation," I parroted, for what felt like the thousandth time since I had arrived in England. I could do it in my sleep by now. "On espionage during the Napoleonic Wars."

"Ah," said Dempster, smiling at me in an intimate way that made me wonder if my sweater had come unbuttoned. "So you're also looking for the Pink Carnation."

The room was so quiet, you could have heard a jaw drop. Mine, for starters.

Also? What in the hell did he mean by also?

The Pink Carnation was mine. All mine. There was no also.

I began to wonder if one could publish before one had anything written. I certainly wasn't going to allow this, this archivist to pip me to the post. My Pink Carnation. Mine, mine, mine.

"Of course," I jabbered, doing everything but hug my notebook to my chest, as if the identity of the Pink Carnation might somehow have leaked across the page, "my dissertation is on espionage more broadly. I'm looking at the means and manner of all sorts of different organizations over that twenty-three-year period between 1792 and 1815…. You said also?"

Dempster shrugged, in a nonchalant gesture worthy of Vaughn himself. "My own background is in history of art, but the Pink Carnation has become something of a hobby for me. Working among these papers" — he gestured broadly back towards the muniments room — "it's very hard not to take an interest. One of history's great mysteries here, at my disposal."

"Of course," I said, relief oozing out of every pore of my body. It was a pity he hadn't taken up the Princes in the Tower instead, but as long as his interest was genuinely that of a bored amateur, it was all fine.

"We might," he suggested delicately, "even be of use to each other. I might be able to direct you to areas of the Vaughn Collection of interest to you."

"Mmm," I said noncommittally. Considering I already knew who the Pink Carnation was, I would be of far more use to him than he to me. As for keeping it secret, my own skills at subterfuge were what one might tactfully call less than well developed. My sister, Jillian, would say it went with the red hair. Did I mention that Jillian is brunette?

On the other hand, if this Nigel Dempster really did know his way around the Vaughn papers as well as he claimed…well, it couldn't hurt to pick his brain just a bit, could it?

I firmly shut out the echo of Jillian's mocking laughter. Little sisters have no respect these days.

Dempster waved a hand at the box in front of me. "If you're looking for spies, I'm afraid you'll find Sebastian a bit of a disappointment."

"Really?"

Dempster perched familiarly on the edge of the table. I could see a bit of striped sock poking out beneath his trouser leg, patterned with discrete red blobs. "For a man who wrote so fluently on politics and art, Sebastian is remarkably chary with the details of his personal life. He remains, even within his own collection, a bit of a shadowy personage."

Were we talking about the same Sebastian? Lord Vaughn? It was the Vaughn collection, after all. I didn't think Lord Vaughn would have tolerated the infiltration of extraneous Sebastians.

Dempster gazed pensively off into space, a pose I recognized from far too many BBC documentaries: historian waxes informative about lack of information. At length. It's amazing how much screen time historians can eke out of the absence of evidence.

"Sebastian's diaries place him in France at suspect times, but never say why. He attends meetings of underground societies, but leaves unspoken to what end. Do you know" — he leaned confidingly forward — "I quite suspect Sebastian himself of being the elusive Pink Carnation." His plummy voice lent "elusive" all the pomp and circumstance of Alistair Cooke introducing Masterpiece Theatre. "But I have no confirmation, no — as it were — proof."

And then it hit me. He didn't know who Jane was. And if he didn't know who Jane was, then none of the rest of it made the least bit of sense. That list of names at the house party that had sent a hundred bells ringing for me wouldn't mean anything at all to someone who hadn't known about the circumstances of Lord Richard's marriage, Lady Henrietta's involvement in the search for the Black Tulip, and the peculiar circumstances of Lord and Lady Pinchingdale's so-called honeymoon. Based on what was available in the public record, all an outsider would know was that Lord Richard, guest at the same house party, had at one point been the Purple Gentian. That was all. And while that might tend to suggest that there might be something more going on than hunt the slipper, it wasn't enough to implicate Jane or inform one of much of anything at all.

Almost all my revelations — the missing bits that enabled me to decode Vaughn's terse notations of his activities — had come as a result of a particular set of privately owned papers. The Selwick papers, to be precise.

Oh dear. Selwick. Colin. Me. Him. Dinner.

All systems accelerated to red alert. Oh God, what time was it? I had been in the basement for what felt like years, but it couldn't have been more than a few hours, could it? There were no windows down there, just those plain whitewashed walls. For all I knew, it could have been anytime between noon and midnight.

"I've often thought," mused Dempster, in uncanny echo, "that the answer must lie in the Selwick papers."

Oh, damn, damn, damn. I needed to take a shower, and pick an outfit, and shave every part of my body that could possibly be shaved, whether he was going to see it or not. In short, all the requisite predate preparations that men never notice, anyway, but without which we can't make it out of the door of the apartment.

"Do you know what time it is?" I asked abruptly.

Dempster was taken aback, but the influence of the old school tie prevailed. "Six o'clock."

I had been there for five hours? Thank goodness he had interrupted me, or I might have turned into an archival Rip Van Winkle. I could picture Colin standing there…slowly turning old and gray…while I moldered away forgotten in the basement of the Vaughn Collection, just transcribing one last document. Of course, he wouldn't be standing there all that while. Some other lucky woman would undoubtedly snatch him up in the meantime. Intelligent Englishmen with decent dental work don't come along every day.

"Will you excuse me?" I blurted out. "I really have to run. I have a dinner engagement — lost track of time — really don't want to be late."

"And it's a Saturday night," Dempster finished for me, looking less stiff than I had seen him. He really wasn't a bad-looking man once he dropped the posing. If you liked that sort of type. "Don't worry. I'll put these away for you."

"Are you sure?" I began shoving my personal effects pell-mell into my bag before he could change his mind. "That would be beyond kind of you. Thank you."

"I'm assuming you'll be back?"

"Absolutely! First thing on Monday." I grinned at him. "And I promise not to make you clean up my mess next time."

Sweeping my bag onto my shoulder, I wriggled out of my chair, all but overturning it in my haste.

Dempster edged gingerly off the table so as to cause the minimum creasage in his Savile Row slacks. "There is a fee."

"A fee?" Swiveling back around, I tripped over the pointed toe of my own boot. Had I missed the small print somewhere?

"Coffee," Dempster elaborated, looking far too pleased with himself. I suppose it wasn't every day that he got to send a girl staggering.

"Uh, sure. Coffee." He'd made me lose precious minutes for that? "That would be great. I'll look forward to it." I paused in the doorway just long enough for a haphazard wave. "Bye!"

The faint echo of "next week" followed me up the white-walled stairs. Fortunately, I knew the type. It wasn't my personal attributes that spurred him on, it was the prospect of an informed audience as he trotted out all his pet theories about the Pink Carnation. There would be no need to invoke the specter of an invisible boyfriend to ward him off.

Unless, by that point, it wasn't an invisible boyfriend anymore, but a real one. One with toffee blond hair and square, capable hands…

The jolt of my bag bumping against my hip brought me abruptly back to my senses. No point in getting ahead of myself when we hadn't even had our first date yet. Although I could imagine just how comfortable it would be to curl up together on the couch on a Sunday morning, matching coffee mugs perched on the coffee table, a half-eaten bagel sitting askew on a copy of the Sunday Times.

Hitching up the strap of my bag before it could bump me again, I got myself firmly in hand. I didn't even have a coffee table. And I wasn't sure if they sold bagels in London. In fact, I was pretty sure that the whole idyllic image came straight out of a New York Times commercial. Reality wasn't like that. Reality was spilled coffee and newsprint on one's fingers — and being too comfortably snuggled up against a warm shoulder to care. I didn't need the bagel or the coffee table. I didn't need the paper. All I wanted was the man.

And if I kept this up, I was going to work myself up into a proper state of first-date nerves, the type where you can barely muster a hello, much less impress the other party with your wit, charm, and long-term entertainment potential. It would be lovely if one could just circumvent the whole process and skip straight to coupledom. No excessive grooming, no wardrobe panics, no blurting out idiotic things and praying the other person will be too busy agonizing over blurts of their own to notice. Of course, then, as my friend Alex (short for Alexa) is fond of pointing out, you miss half the fun of it.

Easy for Alex to say. She's been with the same guy since freshman year of college. It only seems fun if you don't have to do it.

Hurrying away from Belliston Square in what I hoped was the right direction, I found myself smack in front of an array of footware. Like a homing pigeon with expensive tastes, I had gone in precisely the wrong direction, landing myself on New Bond Street, directly in front of Jimmy Choo. Oh well, it wasn't a disaster. At least, it wouldn't be as long as I didn't go in and buy anything. One shoe there could wipe out my stipend for the entire month. A pair would be completely out of the question.

Fortunately, I had made my way to Bond Street before. All I needed to do was follow New Bond Street all the way up past the glossy shop fronts until I hit the grotty hubbub of Oxford Street, and from there it was a straight twenty-minute walk back to Leinster Street and my basement flat. I wasn't taken any chances on the tube. If it knew I had a date, it would be sure to break down.

I was just scurrying off in that direction, when two men stepped out into the street right in front of me. They were coming out of Russell & Bromley, that most veddy British of men's shoe stores, and my first thought was, Ha! So men do go shopping together in pairs, too.

My second was much less coherent and involved ducking around or under or behind things, if only there had been anything to duck around or under or behind. Somehow, I had the feeling that crashing through the plate-glass window of Jimmy Choo would be far more conspicuous than staying put. The fight-or-flight instinct had taken hold, and flight was well on its way towards winning.

Because those weren't just any two men.

The one carrying a shoe box, who looked as if someone had just shot his pet dog, I vaguely recognized from the night of my disastrous blind date with the man of Grandma's choosing. But I wasn't concerned with him. It was Colin who worried me; Colin, who was strolling blithely along beside him, right in my direction. My unshowered, ungroomed, decidedly unkempt, anything but seductive direction.

In the glow of light from the shop windows, cutting against the November dusk, Colin's hair shone like tawny gold of an old coin, back before they started diluting the currency with lesser alloys. Next to his stockier, darker friend, he looked like a Plantagenet monarch with Thomas а Becket in tow, ready to conquer France at a single blow and sweep single heiresses off their feet. I, on the other hand, looked like a mugwump.

Since it was too late to duck or flee, there was nothing to do but brazen it out. "Hey, there!" I called out, waving my arms like a one-woman semaphore competition. "Yoo-hoo! Colin!"

I'm not sure if it was the yoo-hooing or the waving that did it, but his tawny head turned in my direction and his face broke into a great big smile. It looked rather nice that way. He didn't seem to notice that my hair was greasy or that my Barbour jacket was two sizes too big, or that I was wearing pants that had probably been designed for a circus clown. He just seemed genuinely glad to see me.

How very bizarre.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, with real interest.

"I've been archiving in the area," I explained airily. "I was just on my way off home."

"Archiving?"

"I archive, you archive, he/she archives…."

"Naturally," Colin said with a grin. "I ought to have known." Belatedly remembering his friend, he turned and gestured in his direction. "Eloise, have you met Martin yet?"

"No, I haven't," I said pleasantly, rather liking that "yet" and the sense of inevitability that came with it, as though it was a matter of course that I would be introduced to his friends. On the other hand, I was also friends — or friendish — with his sister, so the odds were that I would meet them socially sooner or later, even if not through him.

As you can tell, I analyze way too much, especially when there's nothing there to analyze.

I held out a hand to Martin. "Pleased to meet you."

Martin held out a hand back. It was a nice enough hand, but his clasp lacked conviction. He looked, quite frankly, as though he were somewhere far, far away. Wherever that place was, it wasn't a pleasant one.

"So, I see you've been shopping?"

Martin nodded.

"Shoes," said Colin informatively.

"Useful things, shoes," I commented.

Martin nodded again. His conversational repertoire appeared to be limited.

"Well, if you two are still in the middle of shopping, I wouldn't want to keep you," I said, beginning to edge away. I pointed a finger at Colin. "I'll see you at eight?"

"There's no need for that," said Colin.

I frowned. Did this mean he had noticed the lack of shampoo and rather inadequate application of deodorant?

"We're just finished," Colin clarified. "So if you're hungry now…?"

I could hear my friend Pammy's voice in my head, whispering, "Hungry for what?" I made it stop. Dinner early was an awful idea. I still needed to shower and change and shave — not necessarily in that order.

"I was just off home, anyway," Martin put in, proving he could manage not only words but whole phrases.

I looked at him worriedly. If he were my friend, there'd be some serious "Is everything okay?" going on. But men don't operate that way — at least not in the presence of members of the opposite sex.

"Are you sure?" I asked, looking from him to Colin, which was the closest I could get to an "Is he going to be okay?" without actually saying it.

Martin answered by raising the hand not holding the shoe box. "Cheers."

"Cheers," Colin responded.

Neither of them sounded particularly cheery.

"Is he going to be all right?" I murmured. "He looks like his dog just died."

Colin glanced down at me in complete comprehension. "Not his dog, his girlfriend. She gave him the shaft last week."

"Oh!" I said, as memory hit. "Martin. The one who just had the bad breakup."

Colin nodded. "He's not exactly at his most sociable right now. They were together for four years."

"Ouch." I craned my head back over my shoulder, much the way one might rubberneck at roadkill, but Martin had already been obliterated by the shifting patterns of the crowd. "Poor guy."

Colin looked grim. "She rang him while we were in the store."

Since another ouch would be redundant, I said, "Does she want him back?"

"No. She wants to be friends."

"Poor Martin," I said softly. There's nothing worse than being strung on by an ex. Not that I would know. When I dumped Grant, I had done it cleanly — if it can be called cleanly to fling a ring in someone's face and hang up on all his subsequent calls. But at least I left him in no doubts as to my sentiments. Once you've called someone lying, cheating scum who belongs under the nearest rock, and called him that loudly and in public, there's just no going back.

"So," said Colin, looking down at me in a way that banished both Martin and the memory of evil exes from the horizon. "Shall we?"

Absurd as it sounds, we'd been so companionably chatting about his friend's angst that I'd nearly forgotten we were supposed to be on a first date. And that I was unshowered, untweaked, and otherwise unkempt.

I looked down at the silly pants, at my computer bag bumping against my hip, and thought of a hundred reasons to say no. I could tell him I wanted to drop my things off at my flat. Even half an hour would buy me enough time to hastily shower, put on a sweater without dyed-in deodorant stains under the arms, and give myself an extra inch with a pair of super-tottery going-out heels. I could make the usual big, predate fuss.

Or I could just go along with Colin.

"Sure," I said, smiling up at him through the tousled strands of my greasy hair. "Let's."