“You”—she wagged a teaspoon at me—“should be packing.”
Over my protests, she herded me towards the door.
“I look forward to hearing the results of your researches when you return,” she said firmly.
I murmured the appropriate responses, and started towards the stairs.
“And Eloise?” I paused on the top step to look back. “Don’t mind Colin.”
“I won’t,” I assured her breezily, waved, and continued on my way.
Manuscripts, manuscripts, manuscripts, I sang to myself. But despite my cavalier words to Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, I couldn’t help but wonder. A two-hour drive to Sussex—could we make polite conversation for that long? And then two nights under the same roof, two days in the same house.
It was going to be an interesting weekend.
Historical Note
At the end of any historical novel, I’m always plagued with wondering which bits really happened. Richard and Amy’s exploits, along with the whole host of flower-named spies, are, alas, purely fictional. Napoleon’s plans for an invasion of England were not. As early as 1797, he had his eye on the neighboring coastline. “Our government must destroy the British monarchy . . . That done, Europe is at our feet,” Napoleon schemed. Even during the short-lived Peace of Amiens (the truce that enabled Amy to join her brother in France), Napoleon continued to amass flat-bottomed boats to convey his troops to England. In April 1803, on the eve of the collapse of the peace, Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States to raise money for the invasion—a more reliable method of fund-raising than bullying Swiss bankers.
As for the Bonapartes and their hangers-on, while caricatured a bit (something of which Amy’s beloved news sheets would no doubt approve), they have been drawn largely from life; Napoleon’s court boasts a rich collection of contemporary memoirs and a mind-boggling assortment of modern biographies. Josephine’s extravagances, Napoleon’s abrupt entrances to his wife’s salons, Pauline’s incessant affairs—all were commonplaces of Napoleonic Paris. Georges Marston’s drinking buddy, Joachim Murat, suffered a tumultuous marriage to Napoleon’s sister Caroline; Josephine’s daughter Hortense took English lessons at the Tuilleries until her tutor was dismissed on suspicion of being an English spy; and Beau Brummel really was that interested in fashion.
In the interest of the story, some rather large liberties were taken with the historical record. Napoleon inconsiderately sacked Joseph Fouché and abolished the Ministry of Police in 1802. Both were reinstated in 1804—a year too late for the purposes of this novel. But no novel about espionage in Napoleonic Paris could possibly be complete without Fouché, the man who created Napoleon’s spy network and cast terror into the hearts of a whole generation of Frenchmen and English spies. In addition to rehiring Fouché a year too early, I also made him the gift of an impressive new Ministry of Police on the Ile de la Cité. No existing building possessed an extra-special interrogation chamber ghastly enough for Gaston Delaroche.
I also rearranged England’s secret service a bit. During the Napoleonic Wars, espionage was coordinated through a subdepartment of the Home Office called the Alien Office—not the War Office. Given the strong fictional tradition of ascribing dashing spies to the War Office, I just couldn’t bring myself to have Richard and Miles reporting to the Alien Office. I could picture the wrinkled brows, the raised eyebrows, and the confused “Shouldn’t he be going to the War Office? Where do aliens come into it? I didn’t know this was that kind of book!” As a compromise solution, while I call it the War Office, any actual personnel, buildings, or practices described in conjunction with Richard’s and Miles’s work really belong to the Alien Office. For the little-known story of the Alien Office and much more, I am deeply in debt to Elizabeth Sparrow’s wonderful book, Secret Service: British Agents in France 1792–1815, which is, essentially, Eloise’s dissertation. Eloise, however, is not jealous, since she a) has that fabulous scoop about the Pink Carnation, and b) is fictional.
Readers Guide
A conversation with Lauren Willig
Q. Where did you get the idea for The Secret History of the Pink Carnation?
A. Baroness Orczy used to say that the Scarlet Pimpernel strolled up to her one day at a Tube stop. My introduction to the Purple Gentian was far less dramatic. After years of exposure to the Scarlet Pimpernel and his swashbuckling brethren, it occurred to me that the Pimpernel and Zorro and all those other masked men really had it way too easy. Their plans were seldom foiled; they always landed on their feet when swinging through windows; and, for the most part, their heroines stayed out of the way, cheering from the sidelines. Clearly, this state of affairs couldn’t be allowed to continue. I set about plotting mayhem, and quickly decided that an enemy would be an insufficient obstacle to fling into my suave spy’s path. Enemies were too simple, too easy. I would bedevil my hero, not with an enemy, but with an unwanted ally. A strong-minded heroine set on unmasking him—so she can help him. It was every spy’s worst nightmare. Once that crucial question was resolved, the plot rapidly fell into place. Napoleon’s interest in antiquities and the archaeological aspect of the Egyptian expedition provided a cover for my hero, and the guillotine a motive for my heroine. After that, however, the characters pushed me aside and took over. Richard flatly refused to swing into rooms on a rope, and the smuggling subplot, which was originally accorded a much larger role, all but disappeared. As for Jane . . . let’s just say that Jane was originally supposed to be meek and mild.
Q. Why did you pick this particular time period?
A. When I was ten, one of the inevitable Napoleon and Josephine miniseries aired on television. Enthralled, I badgered my father, a former historian, for books on the topic. He replied with a pile of heavy tomes. They might be dusty on the outside, but on the inside, they teemed with color and intrigue. I laughed over Josephine’s pug dog biting Napoleon on their wedding night and cried over the unhappy marriage of Josephine’s daughter to Napoleon’s brother. I even named all of the guppies from my fifth grade science project after Napoleon’s numerous relations. Although the guppies long ago departed for that great fishbowl in the sky, my interest in the Napoleonic Wars has remained, from the English side as well as the French. With Waterloo so firmly fixed in our imaginations, sometimes it’s hard to remember that the threat of French domination seemed a very real thing to contemporaries, as gallant little England held out alone against the growing forces of France (England’s Continental allies showed a distressing habit of surrendering every time Napoleon defeated them in battle). It was a time of flux and turmoil, as England reacted to the shocking news and ideas pouring across the Channel, fearing rebellion within as well as invasion without. Uncertainty and upheaval may not make for comfortable living, but they provide great fodder for both historians and novelists.
Q. You’re in graduate school and law school, and yet still find time to write novels. How do you juggle?
A. It helps that I have very poor television reception. Aside from the lack of distractions, it all comes down to what I think of as the Theory of Productive Procrastination. It’s a sad fact of human nature—or, at least, my nature—that one never wants to do what one is actually supposed to do. The minute I undertake a task, I would instantly rather be doing something else. Laundry, for example, or cleaning out the bottom of the closet. Writing The Secret History of the Pink Carnation gave me something to do while avoiding working on my dissertation. Of course, the dissertation still needed to get done, so I had to add on law school. In comparison with doing my torts homework, the dashing Royalists who form the subject of my dissertation suddenly took on a renewed allure. And to get myself to do my law school homework . . . well, there’s always the new book to procrastinate from now, even if it does mean that my closet is still messy and likely to remain so. I find the same rule applies within the Pink Carnation books; whenever the historical characters begin to weary me, there’s always Eloise to play with, and vice versa.