The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Authors: Lauren Willig
- Language: English
- Genre: Novels
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Grant.
My mind lightly touched the name, then shied away again. Grant. The other
reason I was playing sardines on the Tube in London, rather than happily
spooling through microfilm in the basement of Widener.
I ended it with him. Well, mostly. Finding him in the cloakroom of the
Faculty Club at the history department Christmas party in a passionate
embrace with a giggly art historian fresh out of undergrad did have
something to do with it, so I couldn’t claim he was entirely without a part in
the breakup. But I was the one who tugged the ring off my finger and flung it
across the room at him in time-honored, pissed-off female fashion.
Just in case anyone was wondering, it wasn’t an engagement ring.
The Tube lurched back to life, eliciting a ragged cheer from the other
passengers. I was too busy trying not to fall back into the lap of the man
sitting in front of me. To land in someone’s lap once is carelessness; to do so
twice might be considered an invitation.
Right now, the only men I was interested in were long-dead ones.
The Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation… The very
music of their names invoked a forgotten era, an era of men in knee breeches
and frock coats who dueled with witty barbs sharper than the points of their
swords. An era when men could be heroes.
The Scarlet Pimpernel, rescuing countless men from the guillotine; the Purple
Gentian, driving the French Ministry of Police mad with his escapades, and
foiling at least two attempts to assassinate King George III; and the Pink
Carnation… I don’t think there was a single newspaper in London between
1803 and 1814 that didn’t carry at least one mention of the Pink Carnation,
the most elusive spy of them all.
The other two, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian, had each, in
their turn, been unmasked by the French as Sir Percy Blakeney and Lord
Richard Selwick. They had retired to their estates in England to raise
precocious children and tell long stories of their days in France over their
postdinner port. But the Pink Carnation had never been caught.
At least not yet.
That was what I planned to do—to hunt the elusive Pink Carnation through
the archives of England, to track down any sliver of long-dead gossip that
might lead me to what the finest minds in the French government had failed
to discover.
Of course, that wasn’t how I phrased it when I suggested the idea to my
dissertation advisor.
I made scholarly noises about filling a gap in the historiography, and the deep
sociological significance of spying as a means of asserting manhood, and
other silly ideas couched in intellectual unintelligibility. I called it
“Aristocratic Espionage during the Wars with France: 1789–1815.”
Rather a dry title, but somehow I doubt “Why I Love Men in Black Masks”
would have made it past my dissertation committee.
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