I grabbed up a notebook at random and plunked it open on my lap, just in time. The door swung open on a widening arc, and a sleek brown head poked through.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, forgetting to try to look scholarly and absorbed. “Hi!”
Serena kept one hand on the door, as though unsure of her welcome. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said, hovering in the door frame. “Please don’t mind me. I just came to collect a pair of earrings from Aunt Arabella.”
I half-scrambled, half-slid off the bed, my wool pants tugging up against my calves as I slithered down. “You’re not bothering me at all. I was just about to call it a day anyway, before I overstay your aunt’s hospitality.”
As I said it, I realized it was true. The early dusk of winter had fallen, leaving it full dark outside, bringing into relief the cheerful circle of light cast by the bedside lamp. From across the way, I could see the dim reflection of a television screen through the window. It must be getting on towards dinnertime, at least. Judging from the profusion of cream-colored cardboard cards on the mantel, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had evening plans. She had let me stay behind to keep on researching while she went out once before, but I couldn’t expect her to make a habit of it. No matter how nice she was being about it, it was still an imposition.
On an impulse, I asked Serena, “What are you up to tonight?”
Serena ventured a small, shy smile. “Watching Emmerdale?”
I wasn’t entirely sure, but I rather thought that we might just have shared a private joke. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Serena had a sense of humor—according to Pammy, she had been very clever in school—but I had never had a chance to see it before. Probably because I was generally talking. Or Colin was there, and—let’s be fair—when Colin was around, I didn’t notice terribly much about anyone else.
“What would you say to a movie? There’s the new James Bond playing at the theatre in Whiteley’s. I guess that’s pretty out of your way, though.”
“No, I’d love to go,” said Serena hastily, pushing her hair out of her face with both hands. “Unless—that is—unless you’d rather wait and see it with Colin.”
“Not at all,” I said firmly. “He doesn’t need to see me drooling over Pierce Brosnan. It might hurt his feelings.”
I got a full-fledged smile that time.
I waved my mobile in the air. “I’ll just check for show times.” Our breath misting in the cold night air, we bundled into a cab. I almost never took cabs—a student stipend only stretches so far—so it felt wonderfully decadent to be coasting off into the night in a big black car to indulge in gratuitous entertainment in the middle of the week. The sharp air had brought a tint of bright color to Serena’s thin cheeks. We scrambled into the back of the cab in a flurry of high heels and dropped gloves and trying to figure out who had accidentally sat on whose coat in the confusion of scooting across the black leather banquette.
We gave the cabbie the address and plopped back, with breathless laughter, against the back of the seat in the cozy, dark interior. We were going to the big multiplex in Leicester Square rather than the one in the Whiteley’s shopping center, since we had already missed one and were too early for the other at Whiteley’s. Besides, it somehow seemed more equitable to go to a theatre that would be equally inconvenient for both us, for Serena in Notting Hill and for me in Bayswater.
“I hope this one is good,” I said, twisting to sit sideways with one arm against the back of the seat. “Thanks for saying you’d come with me.”
“Did you find what you were looking for at Aunt Arabella’s?” Serena asked politely.
“Sort of,” I said. “I think so.”
It might have helped if I could have said with any certainty what it was I had been looking for. Popular legend ascribed to the Pink Carnation various exploits in India, although neither the contemporary media accounts nor the scholarly sources had been terribly clear about what those exploits were meant to be. All that I knew was that the Pink Carnation was meant to have done something, somehow, in India. I had always wondered how he (back when I started my dissertation I had still assumed the Pink Carnation must be a he, arrogantly supposing that the Pink might even be a clever play on the phrase “pink of the ton” generally ascribed to dandies and the like) had managed that, when India was a six-month journey by boat. Each way. How would the Pink Carnation have had time to get to India, foil a dastardly French plot, unravel a league of spies, and then get back to Europe in time to meddle in Napoleon’s coronation plans? It had never made any sense to me. Given the lack of such conveniences as telephones, fax machines, and FedEx, it didn’t seem quite likely that the Pink Carnation would have been able to pass along orders remotely.
But it looked as though at least one aspect of the legend was being borne out. There had been a French spy ring in India and it had still been extant as late as 1804. For those non-historians out there, that in itself was a significant coup. Most people tend to just ignore India in the context of the Napoleonic Wars after 1799, assuming that once Napoleon got his unmentionables kicked in Egypt, that part of the world just ceased to be in play.
The system of flower names did seem to imply some sort of cohesive, overall organization, unless, of course, the Indian group was merely copycatting off their European counterparts. But who was organizing them? They might have been a part of the Black Tulip’s empire, autonomous now that the Black Tulip had—presumably—gone to his reward. But the Black Tulip had specialized in petals, not in other flowers. I had the uneasy sense of having stumbled onto something far larger than I had anticipated and I had no idea at all where it was going.
If I were sensible, I would give the whole idea a miss. I would stick to the dissertation outline I had already submitted to my advisor, focusing entirely on the spies’ European operations, without branching into the hinterlands.
But I was curious. Let’s be honest, I was also looking for excuses to avoid writing up what I already had. Needing more research is always a brilliant reason to postpone actually writing your dissertation. After all, no one can accuse you of being lazy when you’re working. There’s a reason why you meet fifteenth-year grad students still diligently puttering away in the archives, amassing huge stockpiles of entirely undigested information. I knew one guy who spent nine years filling five file cabinets with notes without ever writing a single page of his dissertation.
Of course, there was no way I could justify my incursions into the Selwick photo albums as work. That was a different type of curiosity entirely.
“How are the Valentine’s Day preparations going?” I asked in return. “The party, I mean.”
The gallery for which Serena worked was throwing a big party for Valentine’s Day, to showcase the works of one of their flagship artists, who apparently concentrated on deconstructing the Western tradition of romantic love. I hadn’t recognized the name of the artist, but the price tags on his sculptures were enough to make my eyes go pop.
I’m a Pre-Raphaelite girl, myself. They did such a good job of painting red-haired women.
“You and Colin don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Serena said earnestly, once we had chatted about the mundanities of catering and guest lists and the pluses and minuses of having an event on Valentine’s Day.
“Of course we do!” I exclaimed, a little too heartily.
Serena gave me a look. She might be insecure, but she wasn’t stupid. It was probably painfully clear that my ideal Valentine’s Day had more to do with champagne for two than squinting at abstract sculptures deconstructing the gendered Western notion of “love” (quotation marks theirs, not mine).
“I never say no to pink champagne,” I added. That, at least, was true. And when it came down to it, I was just happy to have someone to be with on Valentine’s Day, whatever it was we did with it. I wished Serena had someone, too. Sadly, the Martin plan appeared to have been a damp squib.
Although he was coming to the galle
ry party, according to Colin. Under the influence of pink champagne, who knew what might happen?
“Pammy is coming, too,” said Serena.
“Is she bringing anyone?” I asked curiously. Between Colin and the archives, I hadn’t spoken to Pammy for a good few days. Given the way she went through men, she might be just about anywhere on the dating cycle since I had spoken to her.
“She’s bringing a friend, she said,” reported Serena, with a nice appreciation for the ambiguity of the remark.
“That could mean anything,” I said in disgust. “I’ll have to call her and ask. Oh, and did you know that Martin’s coming?”
As an attempt at casual, it failed miserably.
Serena looked at me from under the shiny waves of her hair, with an expression of resigned tolerance that made me feel very, very young and very, very gauche. For a moment, she looked a great deal like her great aunt. “I don’t fancy Martin,” she said patiently.
“No?”
“No,” she repeated firmly, adding, “but it was sweet of you to try.”
Chagrined, I stared out the window as our cab nearly took the side mirror off a double-parked SUV. “What about Nick?” I asked, throwing Pammy to the wolves. Pammy could take care of herself.
“Nick,” said Serena carefully, “doesn’t fancy me.”
“He certainly likes you,” I said.
There it was again. That resigned curve of the lips, like the cover of old Judy Collins albums, where she’s singing about being imprisoned behind the isinglass windows of her eyes. “No,” she said. “It’s just not on. Nick likes me as his friend’s sister. That’s all.”
“Mmmph,” I said. If Miles Dorrington could learn to think of Henrietta Selwick as something other than a little sister, why couldn’t Nick Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was take another look at Serena?
“No,” repeated Serena quietly but firmly.
“Okay.” Fortunately, the cab chose that moment to screech up to the curb, so in fumbling for the fare, the topic was dropped. While I was dropping pound coins on the floor of the cab, Serena efficiently paid the cabbie, rounding the fare off to the next number rather than falling prey to the American rule of fifteen percent. The cabbie, who must have heard my accent, looked disappointed.
I managed to reclaim my rolling change and get myself out of the cab without further incident, thinking soberly that I had to make myself stop treating Serena like a backward child, just because she wasn’t as manically outgoing as most of the people of my acquaintance. For all that Serena’s shyness made her seem younger, we were the same age. Depending on the date of her birthday, she may even be a few months older.
How had I come to start babying her like that? I guessed it came partly from knowing her through Pammy, who treated everyone, including me, like substandard preschoolers needing her firm hand and wise advice. There was also the fact that I’d wound up taking care of Serena on the second meeting of our acquaintance, holding her head over a toilet bowl at a party while she lost the remains of her supper. On top of that, there was Colin, who had all the protective condescension of any big brother for a delicate younger sister and who had strongly conveyed all of that to me. Not that any of those made a particularly good excuse.
It really was pretty presumptuous of me to try to give Serena advice about Nick and Martin, whom she had known far longer than I had. These were her people, not mine. When it came down to it, all of this was her world, not mine. She knew the streets, the people, the currency, the social cues in ways I didn’t and probably never would.
There are times when I don’t like myself much, and this was one of them. I felt like the worst sort of American stereotype, pushy and naïve all at the same time.
“Where do we go?” I asked with unaccustomed humility. Not wanting to brave the thronged street around the theatre, the cab had set us down some way from our goal.
Serena tugged her glove up on her wrist. “Just there,” she said, nodding.
Despite the movie’s having been out for a few weeks already, it was a popular showing, with people milling about in clumps as they filtered their way inside. Long posters hung on the side of the building, advertising the hero of the film in various dashing poses. I might like my nineteenth-century spies in knee breeches, but there was, I thought, really something to be said for martinis shaken, not stirred. “He’s so cute,” I said with a sigh, linking my arm through Serena’s.
“Yes,” she agreed distractedly, and I realized she wasn’t looking at the poster.
Following her gaze, I could see a shock of red hair, visible among the shorter heads in the crowd. It was a different shade of red than mine, with more brown in it, cut in that casually expensive male style that looks as though someone just took a hedge trimmer to it. His teeth were very white against his ski-tanned skin as he smiled lazily down at his companion. His arm was slung cozily around her shoulders.
It wasn’t Pammy—after umpteen years of school together, I would know Pammy from any angle—but it was someone of the same type, medium height, trendily dressed, with short, fluffy, expensively highlighted hair.
Of all the theatres in London we could have chosen . . . Damn. Damn, damn, damn. It was small consolation that now I didn’t have to worry about choosing between Pammy and Serena; they both appeared to have been edged out before the competition even started.
I looked over at Serena and saw her watching me watching them. The Judy Collins look was back on her face, all resigned forbearance.
“See?” said Serena quietly.
It would be hard not to. I wanted to thump Nick over the head with an extra-large box of Milk Duds. Since that wasn’t an option, there was only one thing to be done.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go get some popcorn.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Whatever is that man doing with a bolster stuck down his dress?” demanded Penelope.
In the gardens of the Residency, a makeshift stage had been delineated by means of curtains and lanterns, illuminating a farce being played out by a local troupe of mummers, mostly in dumb show.
“That chap is a man, dressed as a woman, trying to sneak into a zenana,” explained Daniel Cleave, leaning an elbow against the balustrade next to her. A slightly apologetic smile replaced the habitual look of anxiety on his fine-boned face. “Once you’ve seen these fifty times or so, you tend to get a sense of the plot. It will be the unwise horseman being fooled out of his clothes by traveling minstrels next.”
“All his clothes?” demanded Penelope archly.
The mild-mannered civil servant blushed. “Just the outer ones, generally,” he said. “At least, when there are ladies present.”
On the stage, the bosomy imposter had managed to shoulder his way into the zenana, largely by dint of bowling over the eunuchs with his enormous chest, and was attempting to clutch a winsome zenana lady in his amorous embrace, in which he was considerably hampered by his bolster.
“Take it off!” hollered Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske from farther down the veranda.
The sentiment was echoed by his messmate, Ensign Jasper Pinchingdale, who punctuated his advice with a fist in the air that nearly sent him toppling over the railing.
Cleave, Fiske, and Pinchingdale had arrived two days before, bringing with them an escort of eight elephants, eleven camels, and one hundred and fifty servants. Freddy had been overjoyed to have the company of not one, but three new card players, although Mr. Cleave had proved a sad disappointment in that regard. He had, he had said, not the head for high wagers, and business to discuss with the Resident besides. So Freddy and Pinchingdale and Fiske had played cards, while Penelope had made a clandestine foray into Fiske’s baggage without discovering anything more interesting than the fact that Fiske apparently thought it necessary to travel with enough medicaments to stock an apothecary’s shop, with the emphasis on opium in every form one could devise.
One elephant had been devoted to carrying nothing but bottles of port, Madeira, and cla
ret, although, from the way Fiske, Pinchingdale, and Freddy had been going, Penelope suspected its burden would be much lighter by the time they left Hyderabad for Mysore. Fiske and Pinchingdale had clearly been partaking liberally already, but of Freddy there was no sign. Showing a marked lack of interest in mummery, he had strolled back to their bungalow with the expressed intention of fetching Penelope’s shawl for her. Since Penelope hadn’t indicated any desire for it, she suspected that his marital solicitude arose out of a desire for a quick cigar well away from the disapproval of the ladies. Altruism was not a part of Freddy’s makeup.
Below them, the buffoons had ceded the stage to a singer, who was singing in mournful tones in a language Penelope didn’t understand at all. Grumbling, Pinchingdale and Fiske pushed away from the railing, wandering back into the Residency to avail themselves of more of the Resident’s Madeira.
“Am I missing anything terribly exciting?” Penelope asked her companion.
“You should ask Reid to translate for you. His Persian is better than mine,” said Cleave apologetically. “I deal mainly in Bengali these days.”
She could see Captain Reid and the Resident standing a little way down the veranda, deep in conversation. The Resident wore his usual garb of a long, stiffened brocade robe over a pair of loose trousers. With a small red cap on his head, and his narrow whiskers cut in the Persian style, he seemed as exotic and foreign as the keening lament of the singer or the scent of tropical flowers from the vast pleasure gardens he had helped to design. Next to him, Captain Reid looked jarringly normal. His evening clothes were as poorly tailored as his riding dress.
Over the past weeks, they had fallen into a habit of morning rides together. There had never been any official arrangement; it just somehow happened that Captain Reid always happened to be trotting past her bungalow at just the same time that Penelope was having her horse brought round. They were seldom very long rides—Reid always seemed to have appointments to get back to—but they had become more the cornerstones of her daily existence than she liked to admit.