Caroline extended a languid hand. “Whatever took you so long?” Turning back to Emma, she said, “Madame Delagardie, I don’t believe you need any introduction to Colonel Marston.”
Chapter 20
I hightailed it to the library.
I’m not sure what I had been expecting to find. Dempster and Serena in flagrante delicto? Dempster going through my notes, chortling like a stage villain? Instead, the library was as it always was, an oasis of evening calm, the setting sun streaming through the long windows, picking out the worn patches on the red and blue carpet, and highlighting the dust that collected in the long grooves of the ornamental pilasters between the bookshelves. My notebook lay where I had left it, the research books I had been using scattered around in my usual cheerful disarray. It all seemed normal enough.…
I ventured closer. Why was I walking like a member of the bomb squad from
My reference books had verified what I’d found in Jane’s letters. I’d never known that Mr. Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, had lived in France for a number of years, working on his steamboat and various other devices before teaming up with Mr. Livingston and going home to New York. But it appeared that he had. He had also come up with the first-ever panorama, which caused a rage in Paris. Theatrical equipment must have been a no-brainer for him after that.
If it was theatrical equipment, that is, and not the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction.
Wouldn’t that be an interesting double fake! What if Fulton were, in fact, working for the French Royalists? There were various groups floating around, often at odds with each other, seldom in sync with the English and Austrian agents who purported to be working in their interests. Someone had tried to assassinate Bonaparte on his way to the theatre in Christmas 1800—why not in his own theatre in 1804?
Because it hadn’t happened, I reminded myself. That’s the weird thing about reading history through peoples’ papers and documents. You forget that you do know how it all turned out. Charles I was beheaded, Marie Antoinette never made it past Varennes, Bonaparte wasn’t assassinated in 1804.
That didn’t mean someone might not try. Maybe Marston was a double agent.
Huh. That was weird. Not Marston—although he was peculiar enough all by himself—but the folio on the desk, next to the biography of Fulton that I hadn’t quite got around to finishing (or starting). The folio I had thought was the one I had been reading—well, it wasn’t. It had been replaced with another. They all looked the same, those folios, from the outside at least. A late Victorian member of the Selwick clan had catalogued the family papers, albeit in a rather haphazard fashion, pasting them in chronological order into large folio volumes, all of which looked alike, but for the labels on the spine. The one I was holding wasn’t the correspondence of Henrietta Dorrington (née Selwick) and Miss Jane Wooliston, 1804–1805. It was Henrietta Dorrington and Lady Frederick Staines (née Deveraux), 1803–1806.
I’d been through those papers before. They had to do with various intrigues in India, although they weren’t much use without the corresponding documentation from the archives of a now defunct Indian administrative province, fortunately preserved in the notebooks of Colin’s great-aunt, in her flat in London. In short, nothing to do with anything I was doing.
So what was it doing on my desk?
I lifted the folio, turning it this way and that, but it told me nothing. Not as if it was going to pipe up like an item out of a fairy tale and sing, “
What would Dempster want with Henrietta’s India correspondence? His interest, like mine, was in the Pink Carnation and her league. If he wanted that, the Delagardie affair was a positive gold mine. But that folio, the folio dealing with Jane’s summer sojourn at Malmaison, sat chastely on my chair where I had left it, seemingly undisturbed.
Now that I looked for it, I could see the marks of hasty turning on the pages of my notebook, the bent paper, the tiny tears. Okay, well, maybe some of those had been me, but it still made me feel like Sherlock Holmes. And was that a smear of blood on one corner? Oh, coffee. That had been me, then. Oops.
I closed the red plastic cover of my notebook and, defiantly, left it sitting in plain sight on the desk. No point in closing the barn door, right? I jammed my feet harder into my tottery stilettos and marched purposefully towards the library door. Dempster and I were going to have to have ourselves a little talk. I was historian, hear me roar!
Or not.
The library door yanked open just as I put my hand to it, causing me to wobble dangerously on my three-inch heels.
“Steady there,” said Colin, grabbing me just as I pitched face-first into his chest.
There were worse places to be. “Hi,” I mumbled into his shirtfront. “Looking for me?”
“Do you know what time it is?” he said, but I could hear the annoyance fading away even as he said it, in the softening of his tone and the way his arms wrapped around me. “I thought you had done a bunk rather than go down to dinner with me.”
I rubbed my nose into his chest, smelling his familiar scent of detergent and deodorant. “And miss the fun?” I said. “I’m thinking of going down to dinner like this. It’s very comfy.”
He slid a finger beneath my chin, tilting my face up. “You might have some trouble eating that way.”
It would have been nice to just stay that way, but guilt and knowledge lay heavy upon me. By the lurching of my tum, something Dempster this way come, and Colin didn’t know it yet.
“Hey,” I said, reluctantly peeling away. “Is Serena supposed to be here tonight?”
Maybe that hadn’t been the best opening gambit. He let me go. I felt very wobbly without his hands on my arms, wobbly and cold, the crisp air biting into that exposed triangle at the small of my back.
“Why?” He started down the hall to the stairs, me trailing alongside.
I hated the shuttered look on his face. Serena was a closed topic as far as Colin was concerned. Efforts to get him to Talk About It resulted in one of two things: diversion, i.e., kissing that sensitive spot behind my ear, pointing out a rare yellow-billed redheaded warbler through the window (I still wasn’t convinced there was any such bird, but if there was, it clearly responded to the sound of Serena’s name), or simply smiling and changing the subject. Or this. Complete shutdown. No one home, admittance interdicted, beware of dog.
There was nothing to do but blurt it out. “Dempster is here. He’s DreamStone’s historical consultant.”
“What?”
“I know, that was my reaction, too. And it gets worse.” Catching a heel on the worn carpet that ran down the center of the hall, I stumbled in my too-high heels.
“Worse?” He caught my arm, drawing it through his for support, mine or his.
“According to Cate—no, you haven’t met her yet,” I added, before he could ask. “She’s their clipboard girl, and I’ve told her she can use our computer if she likes. Don’t worry, you’ll like her.”
Colin was beginning to look a little bewildered. “What does this have to do with Dempster?”
“Right.” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, according to Cate—you know, the clipboard girl—Dempster got the job through personal connections. Apparently, he’s dating someone connected to the film.”
The carpet came to an end just at the landing. We stood at the top of the stairs, the polished wooden banister stretching along in front of us. One of Colin’s ancestors had redone it all during the height of the Arts and
