Table of Contents
ALSO BY LAUREN WILLIG
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
The Masque of the Black Tulip
The Deception of the Emerald Ring
The Seduction of the Crimson Rose
To Abby Vietor
For more reasons than will fit on this page
Prologue
January, 2004
SELWICK HALL, SUSSEX
Not there, said Colin. Huh? I looked up from slinging my bag onto the guest room bed to see my very recent boyfriend hovering in the doorway, looking as sheepish as a strapping, six-foot-tall Englishman can contrive to look.
That is, unless you would prefer this room, he said, developing a sudden interest in the floorboards. I had hoped you might stay, um, down the hall, with me, but if you would rather have your own room...
Oh! If the floor had been less stubbornly corporeal, I would have sunk through it. I justooops. Autopilot, I exclaimed, scooping up my bag with more haste than grace.
Having stayed in that room on my last visit to Selwick Hall, B.D. (before dating), I had automatically retraced my route without giving any consideration to the thought that sleeping arrangements might have changed since then.
I grimaced in what I hoped was a suitably penitent fashion. I didnt meanwell, you know.
Its amazing how many land mines there can be in the first month of a relationship. Goodness only knows we had had more than our fair share of land mines, rocket fusillades, and artillery batteries in the short period in which we had known each other. And Im not just referring to romantic sparks.
I was afraid it was my snoring put you off, he said with a slight smile, one of those comments thats clearly meant to be a joke but doesnt quite make it.
No, just your habit of stealing all the covers, I said, deadpan.
To be honest, I didnt really know whether he snored or not. As for the cover stealing, I just took it on faith. In the month in which we had been dating, there hadnt been as much occasion as I would have liked to find out. He lived in Sussex; I was based in London. My basement flat was the size of a postage stamp, with a sloping bathroom ceiling designed to brain anyone over five and a half feet; he stayed in the flat of his aging great-aunt when he came to town. While Mrs. Selwick-Alderly wasnt exactly anyones idea of an Edwardian chaperone, I wasnt going to risk being caught sneaking out of Colins room at two in the morning, like a guilty teenager. I hadnt even been that sort of teenager when I was a teenager.
Our week together in Sussex killed two birds with one stone. One, I got my hands on Colin. Two, I got my hands on his archives.
And by archives, I do mean archives. That was how Colin and I had met, a very long three months ago, in the ides of November.
At that point, I had been in England since August and had learned three crucial things in that intervening time: (1) if you need to get anywhere, the tube will break down; (2) the reason so many British women have short hair is because their shampoo comes in tiny bottles; and (3) if no one has ever tackled a dissertation topic before, theres probably a reason why.
It was that third item that was the real clincher. I had been so smugly proud of the topic I had chosen as a G3 (thats third-year grad student in Harvard lingo). My colleagues were all working on riveting projects like The Construction of Gender Identity in Francos Spain; Mine Golde Doth Yscape Mee: The Household Accounts of James I; or, my personal favorite, Turnip Mania: The Impact of the Turnip on the English Economy, 1066-1215. Let them have their turnips! My topic was exciting; it was sexy; it involved men in knee breeches. What wasnt there to love about Aristocratic Espionage During the Wars with France: 1789-1815?
I had overlooked one crucial fact: Spies do not leave records. If they did, they wouldnt be in business long.
The spy I most wanted to track down, the one spy who had never been unmasked by French agents or American historians, had been in business for a very long time, from 1803 all the way through to Waterloo. No one knew who the Pink Carnation really wasbecause the Pink Carnation had been at great pains to keep it that way. I wore tracks through the lobby of the Public Records Office at Kew; I froze the reference computers in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library; I nearly got locked into the Bodleian. By November, my laptop was beginning to look more than a little bit battered, as was I.
Fortunately, I had one last card to play.
Not only had Lord Richard Selwick, aka the Purple Gentian, bequeathed a hearty pile of documents to his descendants, their owner, an elegant lady of a certain age, kindly extended to me the right to read them. However, as all readers of fairy tales know, any good treasure trove comes with a dragon. In place of scales, my dragon wore a green Barbour jacket. Instead of a hoard of gold, he considered it his personal duty to guard the cache of family manuscripts. From me.
Have I mentioned that he was a decidedly attractive dragon? When he wasnt breathing fire at me, that was.
Lets just say he came around in time. As Shakespeare so sagely said, Alls well that ends well. Not only had I found more material than I could have ever hoped for my dissertation, I had acquired a boyfriend in the process. It was like a buy-one-get-one-free sale. On Manolos.
It was, in a word, the utter end in happily ever afters.
The only problem with happily ever after is the ever after bit. Dont get me wrong, I was happy. And, as far as I could tell, Colin was, too. At least, in the limited time in which we had been together.
Therein lay the rub. A mere two weeks after our first official date, Christmas had flung us our separate ways. My tickets back to New York had been booked and paid for well before there was any whiff of a relationship on the scene. As for Colin, he spent Christmas Day in London with his great-aunt and sister and New Years in Italy with his mother, all of which made phone calls more than a little bit complicated. Every time I called him, there was invariably someone in the background pulling Christmas crackers (his great-aunt) or jabbering in Italian (his mother, who apparently liked to pretend she wasnt actually English anymore). Every time he rang me, there were my parents, conspicuously pretending not to listen, and my little sister, Jillian, squealing, Oooh! Is it the boy?
Might I add that Jillian is nineteen and at Yale?
Jillian likes to say that shes mature enough to be immature. My parents call it something else entirely, and did so very loudly, contributing to the din as I pressed my cell phone to my ear and tried to sneak off to my bedroom unseen.
Anyway, between our families, we seldom managed more than a few moments on the phone unmolested. By the time I had returned to London, in early January, Colin had gone off on some sort of business trip to foreign climes. To be honest, I wasnt quite sure what his business was. At this stage in the game, it seemed a little tacky to ask. Id been dating him (even if we hadnt been in the same country for most of it) for nearly a month and a half. Shouldnt I know by now what he did? On the other hand, it was too soon in the relationship to demand to know where hed been. I was damned if I did and damned if I didnt.
