The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (22 page)

Chapter Nineteen

I
t was in considerably reduced spirits that Amy returned to her exploration of the Tuilleries. At first, she peered beneath tables and behind chairs in search of a familiar flash of puce and gold, but Edouard and his companion had disappeared with a speed of which Amy would never have believed her brother capable. He had whisked his padded shoulders and lacy ruffles out of her path faster than the Purple Gentian leaping through a study window.

Ought she, Amy wondered, to broach the topic with Edouard on the way home? Should she simply tell him she knew him to be in league with the Purple Gentian and demand to be allowed to participate? It would certainly save her much time spent skulking about, and give Edouard an opportunity to drop his foppish front in his own home. On the other hand, Edouard might tell her, as he frequently had when they were small children, to mind her own business. In fact, it seemed more than likely that was just what Edouard would do. He had never been amenable to sharing.

All things considered, Amy concluded, she was probably best off maintaining an air of ignorance – and spying on her brother whenever the opportunity arose. She would have to consult with Jane…

‘DISGRACE!’ someone bellowed.

Amy stopped abruptly, shocked out of her reverie. Good heavens, that wasn’t directed at her, was it? She took a quick look around. No. She was alone in yet another of the little antechambers that separated
the grander areas of the palace. The noise had emerged from the door towards which she had been thoughtlessly wandering, a door that stood slightly ajar, as though someone had just entered.

‘YOU ARE A DISGRACE!’ the bellower repeated, with, if possible, an increase in volume.

Amy was considering edging her way back out of the anteroom, when another much softer voice interposed, ‘But, Napoleon, I—’

Amy’s breath caught in her throat. While not exactly a meeting with Fouché, the conversation held promise for the eavesdropper. Perhaps a scandal that she could convey back to the English news sheets? Lifting her muslin skirts in both hands, she tiptoed her way into the space between the door and the wall.

‘Leclerc only dead for a year!’

Leclerc… The name might mean little in terms of international espionage, but Amy pressed her ear against the hinges of the door hard enough to leave a permanent dent. The last time she had spotted Pauline Bonaparte Leclerc, the shameless woman had had her tongue in Lord Richard Selwick’s ear. Her interest, Amy assured herself, was purely professional, not personal. Lord Richard’s amours meant nothing to her, nothing at all. It was just that…that…any scandal that might be damaging to the Bonaparte clan could be helpful to her cause, she rationalised triumphantly.

Through the gap in the door, Amy could hear the clomping of boots on the parquet floor as Bonaparte raged about the room. ‘You’re out of mourning already!’

‘But, Napoleon, I did cut off all my hair and place it in his coffin.’

‘Hair, ha!’ The smack of a palm hitting wood. ‘Hair grows back! It already has! And you! Chasing anything in trousers!’

Amy waited eagerly for a reference to Lord Richard and that scandalous scene in the salon.

‘My Assistant Minister of Police complained that you pinched him in an inappropriate place! Again!’

‘Oh, but, Napoleon, it wasn’t an inappropriate place,’ Pauline
reassured him eagerly. ‘It was in my sitting room.’

Amy eyed the wood of the door with incredulous disgust. Either Pauline Leclerc was one of the most truly addlepated people she had ever encountered (and there was stiff competition for that title, with Derek on that list, not to mention her cousin Agnes), or she was wickedly clever. Amy preferred the first option.

Bonaparte spoke in the simple monosyllables of someone who had also chosen the first option. ‘What was he doing there?’

‘I had to have someone check for spies,’ Pauline answered innocently.

Crash!
Bonaparte had hurled something against the wall. Amy squinted against the hinges. Ah, an inkwell, judging from the large black splotch adorning the wallpaper.

‘Don’t be angry with me, Napoleon,’ Pauline wheedled. ‘It’s just that I am so bored…’

‘Bored? Bored? Find a hobby! Go shopping!’

‘You can’t begrudge me my innocent little amusements…’

‘Your innocent amusements are an international scandal! What do I have to do? Send you to a nunnery?’

An excellent solution! Amy would have seconded the idea had she been a legitimate part of the conversation, rather than an eavesdropper.

‘How can you’ –
sniff –
‘be so unkind? All I want’ –
sniff –
‘is a little happiness.’

‘All
I
want is my family not to embarrass me!’

‘This is Josephine’s doing, isn’t it? She’s poisoned your mind against me!’

Amy had been decidedly right in liking the First Consul’s wife. Josephine was clearly a woman of good taste and sound judgment – except in marrying Bonaparte.

To his credit, the First Consul rose to his wife’s defence, or rather, roared in his wife’s defence, ‘Hold your tongue!’

‘If that’s what you want, I’ll just leave. You’ll never have to see me again.’ The sound of chair legs scraping against wood was followed
by Pauline sobbing her way out of the room. Amy cringed back against the wall, fearing both disclosure and the impact of the door, but Pauline slipped easily through the gap – nobody in the throes of distress should be that graceful, thought Amy critically – bawling into her handkerchief all the while.

‘Pauline! Don’t cry, damn you! Pauline!’ Bonaparte charged out of the room after his sister.

The door slammed open. Fortunately, Bonaparte’s shouts drowned out Amy’s involuntary
oomph
as the heavy wood whacked all of the air out of her lungs.

When the little black spots in front of Amy’s eyes had faded away – except for the legitimate little spots of dust motes dancing in a beam of sunshine – she slipped cautiously out from behind the door. ‘I feel like a dress that was put in a clothespress,’ she muttered to herself.

Once Amy had flexed her shoulders and shaken out her arms, and felt more like herself and rather less like a piece of recently ironed fabric, she tiptoed around to peek into the room that Bonaparte and his sister had so recently vacated. After all, there was only so much one could see through the inch-wide gap between the door and the wall.

Amy’s eye took in, one by one, a wall with a large ink splotch, an iron staircase that looked a bit like an ink splotch itself against the pale wall, and a carpet marred by yet more ink splotches. By far the most interesting feature of the room was a desk, piled with stacks of papers, and surrounded by enough broken quills to re-feather a plump goose.

Bonaparte had left his study empty.

Amy allowed herself only a moment to gloat over her good fortune. With a quick glance either way to make sure no one else was about, she plunged into Bonaparte’s study.

Amy picked her way across the broken quills and balled-up bits of paper on the floor. She really mustn’t disturb anything; she must do nothing to arouse suspicion. And if he returned, she could
legitimately claim to be lost and looking for Hortense. Who would ever suspect a bit of a girl in a yellow muslin dress? Amy practiced looking innocent and mildly daft as she made for the desk. Widen the eyes, drop the lower lip…and, if worse came to worst, cry. From that last interview Amy had gleaned a crucial piece of intelligence; Bonaparte was a soft touch for crying women.

Ah, the desk! Amy briefly clasped her hands together to still their shaking, and then stooped over in earnest. In the centre of the desk lay a piece of paper closely covered with writing, as well as an unintended design of ink dots splattered by the abandoned quill that lay next to it. Clearly, Bonaparte must have been working on this when his sister disturbed him.

Eagerly, Amy snatched it up and began to read. ‘Article 818. The husband may, without the concurrence of his wife, claim a distribution of objects movable or immovable fallen to her and which come into community…’

Oh, for goodness’ sake, what was this drivel? Not only did Amy disagree heartily with the sentiment – she defied any future husband to try to claim a distribution of her objects movable or otherwise without her concurrence – but it was utterly useless to her investigation. Unless Bonaparte’s secret plan for conquering England was to contract a marriage between the two countries and then claim that as husband, France was entitled to all of England’s objects, movable and immovable.

Not being an immovable object, Amy moved on, replacing the offending document in the centre of the blotter, with the quill placed across it as though just dropped by Napoleon’s hand.

A sheaf of papers bristled under a fragment of classical pottery serving as a paperweight. At any other time, Amy would have been intrigued by the artefact; keen on her mission, she went straight for the documents, which were folded and roughly bound together with a piece of string. Carefully, Amy eased the letter on the top out of the pile. Ten thousand francs. Amy squinted at the spidery writing. Had she misread it? No. It was a bill from Josephine’s mantua-maker for a
white lawn gown embroidered with gold thread. Amy yanked out the next paper from the pile, which turned out, unsurprisingly, to be an invoice for the matching slippers. Recklessly, Amy shook out all of the papers, and began to thumb through them. She flipped past bills for cashmere shawls, for diamond bracelets, for shipments of rose cuttings, for more pairs of slippers and gloves and fans than Amy could imagine using in a decade of continuous party-going. There wasn’t a clandestine note or a suspicious purchase among the lot.

Wait! Unless… Could the documents be a code? Perhaps what was meant by slippers was really rifles – different colours could refer to different types! And rose cuttings could refer to cannon balls, or something of that ilk. Buoyed by her own cleverness, Amy snatched back up the documents she had dropped in disgust seconds before. Perhaps by looking at them more closely, she would find a key to the code.

On second glance, it became quite clear that the bills were indeed bills. The only thing revealed by looking at them more closely was that Amy’s imagination was more effective than her spying. And that Josephine, for all her charm, was a prodigious spendthrift, but that wasn’t anything everybody didn’t already know. The English papers delighted in carrying tales of Josephine’s extravagances and Bonaparte’s infuriated reaction. It was rumoured – in the
Spectator,
not the
Shropshire Intelligencer –
that Josephine had already bankrupted the French treasury with her uncontrollable acquisitiveness.

Scowling, Amy bundled the folded papers back into their string. Marvellous. She had stumbled into Bonaparte’s abandoned study in the spying opportunity of a lifetime, and what did she discover? A packet of bills.

Amy rested her hands on her hips and glared at the desk. Really, there had to be something more informative among the clutter. A bird landed on the windowsill, puffed out its chest, and unleashed an operatic series of trills. Absently, Amy flapped a hand at it, hissing, ‘Shh!’ Offended, the bird gave a few indignant hops, relieved himself
on the windowsill, and flew squawking back into the garden to complain to his fellows.

Amy returned to rifling half-heartedly through Bonaparte’s desk. Perhaps the Purple Gentian had been right to call her naïve last night. It had certainly been naïve of her to believe that a man clever enough to take over the rule of a turbulent country, cutting out numerous competitors at home, and conquering a slew of countries abroad along the way, would be dim enough to leave his plans for the invasion of England in plain sight upon his desk.

All right then, if Bonaparte’s secret papers
weren’t
in plain sight upon his desk, she would just have to figure out where they were. By the time she emerged from this room, she would have something to report to the Gentian, something that would make his eyes widen with admiration and his jaw drop. ‘Amy, you astound me,’ he would say, and she would simply raise an eyebrow – well, both eyebrows, since she couldn’t manage just the one – and murmur, ‘You doubted me?’

Amy’s gaze drifted up around the walls, searching for secret caches. That painting on the far wall could conceal a safe of some kind. And over there, by the window, that long, dark line might be a relic of another inkpot that had perished for its country, or it might indicate a break of some kind in the wallpaper. Amy planted both her hands on the desk and leant forward for a better look.

‘Ouch!’ Lesson one of spying: Never plant your hands anywhere without first checking to make sure you won’t be maimed. Amy absently sucked on a cut on her index finger, and searched for the weapon of destruction. She wouldn’t put it past the tyrant to have strewn poisoned tacks on his desk, or… Oh, it was a paper cut.

The sharp edge that had sliced her finger poked out from underneath the blotter. Grabbing the edge with her uninjured left hand, Amy yanked it free. Probably another bill, she thought irately. The series of numbers marching across the page gave credence to that theory, but the signature at the bottom said Joseph Fouché. Fouché had sent Bonaparte calculations for the cost of the Army for the Invasion of England.