“Is not available,” I said. “Please close the door on your way out.”
I’ll say this for her, she did take direction. She pulled the door smartly shut behind her.
I leaned back against Colin. “We’re going to hear about this from Jeremy, aren’t we?”
“Bugger that,” said Colin elegantly. “They’re supposed to have their own Internet connection set up. Since when does Private mean ‘Hey! Come on in!’?” Colin’s voice shifted on the last words into a parody of the film people.
His fake American accent was truly atrocious. I wondered if my fake English accent sounded as awful to him. Probably. Huh.
Colin glowered at the door, as if it had personally offended him by allowing itself to be opened. “What do we have to do, put up an electric fence?”
I decided that this was not a good time to tell Colin that amusing story about the guy who had blundered into our bathroom while I was showering. Picture Psycho, only without the axe and with more Herbal Essences.
“I was thinking buckets of water on the doorjamb,” I said. “If I could figure out how to rig it without getting soaked.”
“Pots and pans,” contributed Colin. “For them to trip over.”
We exchanged rueful smiles.
I stood on my tiptoes to press a quick kiss to his cheek. “Are you going to be okay in here?”
Colin’s eyes drifted to the window. “I’ll put my headphones on,” he promised. “If I can’t hear it, it’s not happening.”
“That’s the spirit!” I cheered. I paused with one hand on the doorknob. “If you get to the point where you can’t take it anymore, you know where to find me. We can drop water balloons on the film crew from the library windows. Or not.”
“Hmph,” said Colin, and pulled his headphones firmly down over his ears. They made him look a bit like Princess Leia.
I decided not to share that observation.
I grinned and waved and drew the door shut behind me, making my way back down the corridor, past the door to the master bedroom, over to the center of the house and the wing that housed the library. We’d taped signs that said “Private” on the door of the master bedroom, the bathroom, Colin’s study, and the library, but, so far, those signs had been just about as effective as the paper they were printed on, when it came to keeping people out.
It was going to be even worse starting this evening.
The high mucky-mucks were first showing up tonight and we were all going to have a great big get-to-know- one-another shindig in the dining room, catered courtesy of DreamStone. With big names to be found, Jeremy had condescended to come out to the wilds of Sussex for it.
Lucky us.
I only hoped that whoever did the seating chart had the sense to place Jeremy and Colin at opposite ends of the table. Not that I really thought Colin was going to go after Jeremy with his fish knife…but, hey, why take unnecessary risks? I’d been tempted to go after Jeremy with something sharp a time or two myself.
In the meantime, we were both trying to go on pretty much as usual, Colin working on the spy novel he claimed he was writing, me making my way through his collection of family papers, taking notes for a dissertation that was turning out to be much more detailed than I could ever have dreamed.
With the threat of imminent return to America hanging over me, though, I had to force myself to focus. With all the rich resources available via Colin, I had let myself meander down some pretty random byways, researching rogue French spies, plots and schemes in India, and even an attempt to kidnap George III. It was time to get back to basics, i.e., the Pink Carnation. I knew she had been in operation in Paris in 1804. There was evidence that she had been involved—albeit peripherally—in the famous plot to assassinate Napoleon that had resulted in the execution of the duc d’Enghien in the spring of 1804.
But what had happened after?
The hallway was mercifully empty, all the crew members outside, making mincemeat of Colin’s ancestral shrubbery. Someone, however, had been inside. The door to the library, with its hand-lettered sign reading “No Admittance,” was ajar.
I had closed it when I left. I knew I had.
My notebook wasn’t on my favorite desk anymore. Instead, it was on the chair, and the folio I had taken out to look at before taking my e-mail break was open, when I was pretty sure I had left it closed.
Weird.
One of the film guys must have been looking for a spare sheet of paper, I decided, rearranging my materials the way I liked them. If any of them had torn out one of the precious documents in the folio and used it for scrap, I would personally tear out his masculine bits and feed them to the dogs.
Colin didn’t have any dogs, but I was sure we could find some in the neighborhood.
Nope. I flipped quickly through. No sign of tearing. The neighborhood dogs were safe. And so, thank goodness, was the correspondence of Lady Henrietta Dorrington with her cousin by marriage, Miss Jane Wooliston, aka the Pink Carnation. The two ladies had constructed an ingenious code, devised around just the sort of frivolous goings-on designed to make the eyes of your average Ministry of Police employee—aka your average male—glaze over, ranging from the new cut of bonnets to the refreshments at the Venetian breakfast. Each of these terms was carefully calibrated to a double meaning designed to convey information back to the authorities in England.
Jane, the mastermind of the piece, collected her information in Paris and sent it back to Henrietta under the guise of frivolity. Henrietta passed it on to her husband, Miles, who in turn saw that it made it to the authorities at the War Office.
I had an advantage the French Ministry of Police lacked. No, not just a reliable coffeemaker. I had Henrietta’s code book. I had been steadily working my way through Jane’s reports through the spring of 1804, the spring of the duc d’Enghien’s execution, the spring Napoleon declared himself Emperor, and the spring when invasion of England seemed imminent.
Stuck among the papers was a fragment of poetry in a surprisingly tidy hand, addressed to Jane but forwarded to Henrietta. I shook out the page and read.
Chapter 1
“Alas!” she cried, “I spy a sail
Hard-by on the wine dark sea.
I know not what it is or bides,
But I fear it comes for me!”
“For, lo!” proclaimed Augustus Whittlesby from his perch on top of a bench supported by two scowling sphinxes. “In Cytherea’s perfumed sleep / Did she dream of the denizens of the dithery deep.…”
“Dithery? How can the deep be dithery?” A female voice, lightly accented, cut into Augustus’s stirring rendition of Canto XII of
