The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (23 page)

Amy’s first impulse was to stuff the paper into her bodice and flee. She went so far as to poise the paper over her neckline, but common sense prevailed. Not only would it create quite a lump under the thin fabric of her dress, but Bonaparte was sure to notice its absence. She would just have to memorise it. Two thousand four hundred ships, Amy repeated to herself, and one hundred and seventy-five thousand men. Amy felt a swell of indignation that had nothing to do with proving herself to the Purple Gentian or the ills done the monarchy. Her overactive imagination had presented her with an image of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Frenchmen marching grimly through Uncle Bertrand’s peaceful meadows, trampling his fields and kicking his sheep.

‘Not while I’m around to stop it,’ Amy muttered, and read on.

The treasury, Fouché wrote, could not support such an expense. No wonder, thought Amy, glancing at the pile of bills she had plunked back down on the desk in irritation moments before. The next time Amy saw Mme Bonaparte, she would be sure to bring her attention to the necessity of owning at least three diamond tiaras.

Unfortunately, Fouché had secured funds from the Swiss. Amy scowled at the letter. Secured, indeed! Extorted would doubtless be the better word. The money, in gold, was to be transported by coach from Switzerland to Paris on the evening of April thirtieth, and thence to what Fouché referred to as ‘a safe place.’

‘That’s what he thinks.’ Amy regarded the scrap of paper with the smug sort of smile usually reserved by felines for canaries.

The last day of April. That gave her a week and a half to figure out how to intercept the money. Plenty of time, thought Amy blithely. First, she would notify the Purple Gentian, who, of course, would be so impressed that he would henceforth include her in all his counsels. Together, they could create a daring plan to make off with the money. Without money, Bonaparte’s invasion of England would be thwarted. The discontented masses would rise against him. And the monarchy would be restored. Amy grinned as she stuck the letter carefully back under the blotter. Not bad work for a girl fresh from Shropshire.

Amy strode hurriedly out of the study. Before she continued on to Hortense, she would have to send a note to the Gentian, telling him to meet her…where? Perhaps in the Luxembourg gardens. She could find a page to –

Ooof! Amy collided at high speed with someone entering the anteroom from the other direction. Her head was still spinning as a pair of capable hands righted her, and a warm chuckle sounded somewhere above her ear. ‘What an original way to make your presence felt!’

Chapter Twenty

‘M
y lord!’ Amy hastily stepped back, this time banging into a bust of Brutus that wobbled ominously on its marble pedestal. Amy grabbed at Brutus before he could take a suicidal leap off his stand. ‘I didn’t…that is…’

‘Had you known it was me you would have taken care to run into poor Brutus instead?’ Lord Richard supplied with a smile of such conspiratorial goodwill that Amy nearly reeled back into poor Brutus once more.

‘Something like that,’ admitted Amy weakly. Clearly, she was still slightly dazed from her two collisions.

Amy felt behind her to make sure she wasn’t going to back into anything else. With Lord Richard in it, the anteroom shrank to nothingness. The tall figure in tight buff breeches and pale blue jacket filled Amy’s line of vision. A dusty ray of sunshine from the one window in the room caressed his head, encircling him with a sort of halo. Halo? Amy caught herself up short before she could descend any further into folly. A man who abandoned his country? Who caressed scantily clad women in the middle of a party? Lord Richard was the last man in the world to deserve a halo.

‘You just missed Mme Leclerc,’ blurted Amy.

‘Pauline?’ Lord Richard frowned in a way that could indicate either confusion or displeasure. ‘Was she looking for me?’

‘Um…’ Why on earth had she said that? Drat. Now if Lord Richard went and found Mme Leclerc she’d be sure to tell him that
she had never even spoken to Amy, and Lord Richard would know Amy had made it up, and might even leap to the conclusion, the
incorrect
conclusion, that Amy cared the slightest little bit about his relationship with Mme Leclerc.

Amy evaded the danger of being caught out in a direct lie by pointing at the door and informing him, ‘She went that way.’

‘Oh,’ was Lord Richard’s lengthy response. Amy waited for him to charge off past the statue of Brutus, through the gilded doors, in pursuit of She of the Diaphanous Dress and Nonexistent Bodice. And waited.

Lord Richard leant lazily against the panelled wall as though he had no other purpose in the world but to stand in a little anteroom with Amy.

‘Don’t you want to go that way?’ Amy asked uncertainly.

Lord Richard considered for a moment. He shook his head. ‘Not really.’

Amy’s eyes searched Lord Richard’s handsome face. She would have thought that he would be in more of a hurry to run off after his paramour. On second thought, maybe that wasn’t all that surprising. Look how rapidly he had gone from flirting with Amy to dallying with Mme Leclerc. Just the way he had flitted off to join the French in Egypt when his very own country was at war with them. Faithless cad!

Amy’s feelings towards Pauline Leclerc rapidly spiralled from animosity to pity. That poor, gullible woman had clearly been as thoroughly taken in by the glib charm of the perfidious Lord Richard as had Amy herself. The woman might wear dresses with as much substance as cobwebs, and her intellectual capacities might be even flimsier, but, still, she deserved better than to be treated like that.

‘Well, you really
ought
to,’ said Amy hotly.

‘Ought to what?’

‘Go after Mme Leclerc.’ Amy glowered at Richard.

Richard regarded Amy quizzically. ‘Is this an attempt to free yourself of my presence? You could just say so.’

‘No!’

‘No, you don’t want to be rid of my presence?’

‘Urgh!’ Amy emitted an inarticulate noise somewhat akin to a snort. Heaving a deep breath, she clarified, ‘Ridding myself of your presence was not my intention—’

‘Delighted to hear it.’

‘Rather,’
Amy bit out, ‘I was hoping to induce you to behave with some consideration—’

‘By leaving you alone as quickly as possible?’

‘No!’ Amy bounced up and down in a way that would have been the prelude to a temper tantrum had she been a decade younger.

As she was twenty, rather than ten, the effect was rather different. Richard’s lips twisted into a bemused smile as he watched her breasts jiggle below the scooped neck of her bodice.

‘Would you like to repeat that?’ he asked hopefully.

Amy scowled at him. ‘What about the word
no
do you find difficult to comprehend?’

‘What in the blazes you mean by it,’ Richard admitted honestly. ‘Let’s back up a step, shall we? You want me to go away…’

‘No.’ Unfortunately, this time Amy didn’t jiggle. Instead, she held up both hands. ‘No. That’s not the point. You’re twisting my words again. Don’t interrupt me! What I’ve been trying to say is that the only decent thing to do is go after Mme Leclerc and make things right with her.’

Richard blinked at Amy. ‘I didn’t realise things were wrong with her.’

Since it didn’t look like Amy was going to bounce anymore, Richard took a moment to actually try to figure out what in the devil she was talking about. This sudden fascination with Pauline made very little sense. Unless Pauline had come upon Amy and bent her ears with tales of unanswered letters of love? That wasn’t a terribly Pauline sort of thing to do. Pauline’s attitude towards love affairs, Richard thought approvingly, could only be called
sporting
. She gave the chase her all, accepeted her defeats with good grace, and seldom whined.

‘How can you be so callous?’

Richard looked down into Amy’s irate, flushed face, and enlightenment dawned.

‘You don’t mean to say that you thought that Pauline and I – good gad, no!’

‘What do you mean, “good gad, no!” I saw the two of you together last night, in Mme Bonaparte’s salon. Do you deny it?’

For a moment, Richard struggled to recall what Amy could possibly be talking about. His encounter with Amy in her brother’s study later that evening had done much to drive any other recollections out of his head, and he had been to so many receptions at the Tuilleries over the years that one tended to blend into another. What could he have been doing with Pauline?

Oh. Pauline had had him backed into a corner. She had also, if memory served, ventured into regions generally reserved for behind closed doors. Richard hoped Amy hadn’t witnessed that. From the strength of Amy’s glare, Richard rather feared that she had. Of course, this all begged the question of how Amy had come to witness that unfortunate moment in the first place. It wasn’t as though he had been entwined with Pauline right in the middle of the room; they had been off in a far corner, well away from the throng of spectators clustering around Bonaparte and Miss Gwen. A group of which, Richard was quite sure, Amy had been a part. In which case, Amy must have followed him.

Richard beamed straight at Amy’s scowling face.

‘See? You can’t deny it,’ Amy said in a suffocated voice.

‘Deny it?’ Richard shrugged. ‘What man wouldn’t want to be seen with Pauline? She is, after all, an exceptionally beautiful woman, don’t you agree?’

Amy nodded woodenly.

‘With exceptionally fine eyes,’ he added devilishly. ‘The sort of eyes a man can lose himself in.’

Amy’s head jerked up and down by a fraction of an inch.

Richard lowered his voice and leant forward conspiratorially. ‘And exceptionally little conversation.’

Amy gaped.

Moving back a step, Richard waved a nonchalant hand. ‘She has
very little to say about the Rosetta Stone, and absolutely no interest in Homer.’

Amy leant back against the wall, feeling completely thrown off balance. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember why she had brought up Mme Leclerc in the first place, and fervently wished she hadn’t.

‘Amy,’ said Richard softly, ‘there is not, nor was there ever, anything between me and Pauline.’

‘Other than her dress,’ muttered Amy.

She hadn’t meant the comment to be heard but Lord Richard’s hearing was unfairly sharp. He gasped with laughter. As he laughed, his green eyes crinkled at the corners, glinting with flecks of gold like leaves touched by the sun.

‘While I must confess that the only person I was looking for was Bonaparte—’

‘He also went that way,’ interjected Amy.

‘I am delighted to have stumbled across you,’ Richard continued with a grin.

‘I can’t imagine why.’

‘Can’t you?’ murmured Richard.

‘You needed to discuss Homer with someone?’ Amy suggested tartly, flinging out the first unromantic image that came to mind.

Only, unfortunately, once she had spoken, she couldn’t help but imagine sitting curled up next to Lord Richard in a large leather chair, in front of a flaming fire on a cold winter’s day, reading aloud the sonorous Greek phrases of the
Odyssey
to one another.

Amy mentally pushed the book aside and doused the fire, just as Lord Richard said, ‘Close enough. I was planning to send you a note, inviting you to come see my antiquities tomorrow.’

Something about the way Richard said ‘my antiquities,’ as proud as a schoolboy with a particularly smashing toad to show off, made Amy want to smile despite herself. Only they weren’t really his antiquities, were they? They belonged to Bonaparte, who had collected them in the course of leading the armies of the Revolution.
No right-minded Englishman would admit to having anything to do with those antiquities. And no right-minded Englishwoman would have anything to do with Lord Richard Selwick, Amy reminded herself sternly. Teasing green eyes or no.

‘That will not be possible,’ she said coldly.

Lord Richard’s eyes lingered knowingly on her face. ‘No blood guilt can pass to you from a few harmless objects.’

Amy lifted her nose in the air as though she hadn’t the slightest notion of what he was talking about.

‘Think of it,’ he continued softly. ‘These statues and jewels and fragile bits of humanity were buried deep in the earth centuries before the world ever heard of Bonaparte. Think of it. The relics of a civilization that was old while France was still covered in forest and London a mere gathering of mud huts.’

His words cast a spell in the mid-afternoon quiet of the room, evoking images of shimmering sands and scurrying men in white robes and black-haired women keening their grief in elaborate burial chambers.

‘Tomorrow afternoon, then. Your cousin and chaperone are, of course, included in the invitation.’ He grinned. ‘Miss Gwen might like a mummy case for use in her horrid novel.’

‘I haven’t accepted!’

‘But you want to.’

Drat. The insufferable man was absolutely right; no matter her feelings for him, she longed to see hieroglyphs carved into stone and ornaments that might once have dazzled the eyes of Mark Antony. Miss Gwen wasn’t the only one with an interest in mummy cases.

‘Why hesitate?’ Lord Richard pressed his advantage. ‘You’re not afraid, are you?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of ancient curses? Of enjoying my company?’

Since that was precisely what terrified Amy, she bristled indignantly. ‘Of course not! Tomorrow afternoon, you said?’

‘Two o’clock, perhaps? The artefacts are lodged in a wing of the
Tuilleries, until we move them into the Louvre. Ask any sentry to show you the way,’ Lord Richard directed, with a smile that struck Amy as uncomfortably close to a smirk.

Too late, Amy realised how neatly she had been seduced and goaded into accepting.

‘You don’t have any apples to offer while you’re at it, do you?’ she asked sourly.

‘Satan tempting Eve in the garden? Not a terribly flattering role for me, is it? And you’re overdressed for the part.’

Amy’s blush rivalled the hue of the dangerous fruit they had been discussing. Somehow, Lord Richard’s frankly admiring gaze made the yellow muslin of her gown feel as insubstantial as a string of fig leaves. Amy covered her confusion by saying quickly, ‘Might I ask a favour, my lord?’

‘A phoenix feather from the farthest deserts of Arabia? The head of a dragon on a bejewelled platter?’

‘Nothing quite that complicated,’ replied Amy, marvelling once again at the chameleon quality of the man beside her. How could anyone be so utterly infuriating at one moment and equally charming the next? Untrustworthy, she reminded herself. Mercurial. Changeable. ‘A dragon’s head wouldn’t be much use to me just now, unless it could offer me directions.’

Richard crooked an arm. ‘Tell me where you need to be, and I’ll escort you.’

Amy tentatively rested her hand on the soft blue fabric of his coat. ‘That’s quite a generous offer when you don’t know where I’m going.’

‘Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end?’ suggested Richard with a lazy grin.

‘Methinks it is no journey?’ Amy matched the quotation triumphantly, and was rewarded by the admiring light that flamed in Lord Richard’s eyes. ‘No, not nearly that far – at least, I hope not. This palace does seem large enough to house a couple of continents. I was looking for Hortense Bonaparte’s chambers.’

The statement was close enough to the truth, and Lord Richard
accepted it without a murmur of disbelief. ‘You’re in the right place,’ he informed her, steering her back into Bonaparte’s study, ‘just a flight below where you ought to be. That little staircase will take you right up to Josephine’s chambers, and Hortense’s are next door.’

‘Thank you.’ Amy lifted one foot to the first step.