The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Read Online Free

right, “set up” might be too strong a term, but she had certainly contrived to throw us in each other’s way. “It’ll be a field trip. Fun!”
    Colin came to stand in front of me. “You mean you don’t want to work on your dissertation.”
    “Pretty much.” It wasn’t just summer slump. I’d hit a snag in the material and I didn’t know how to deal with it.
    Thanks to Colin’s truly excellent archives, I could plot the movements of the Pink Carnation with a fair degree of accuracy between 1803 and 1805. I knew who the Pink Carnation was (Miss Jane Wooliston), where she was living (the Hotel de Balcourt, her cousin’s home in Paris), and exactly what she was doing to thwart Napoleon. Between 1803 and 1805, the Pink Carnation lived in Paris with her chaperone, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows. She kept up a regular coded correspondence with her cousin by marriage, Lady Henrietta Dorrington. And then, in the late spring of 1805 . . .
    The paper trail stopped. Cold. No more letters to Lady Henrietta. No more letters to her cousin Amy Selwick. Nothing. Nada.
    There were several options, none of them good.
    The least awful option was the most obvious: The letters hadn’t survived. As my adviser was fond of saying, just because something wasn’t there didn’t mean it hadn’t existed. It was a miracle that any of these documents survived.
    But why meticulously maintain the correspondence up to that point and then burn the rest? It didn’t make sense.
    Option two: The Pink Carnation had changed aliases or contacts. If the French had caught on to her coded correspondence with Lady Henrietta, she might have changed her modus operandi, started writing under a different name to a different contact. Clearly, if she had done so, she had not been thinking about the convenience of future historians. On the other hand, at least it meant she was still alive and kicking.
    Then there was the final and deadliest option: Something had happened to the Pink Carnation.
    It wasn’t impossible. The Carnation was living in constant risk of discovery, her sole protection the French Ministry of Police’s inability to ascribe that kind of cunning to a woman, and a beautiful one at that. All it took was one slip, and it would all be over. The life of a spy wasn’t exactly without danger. The Carnation’s old nemesis, the Black Tulip, had gone up in smoke, quite literally, in the middle of a botched assassination attempt, but a new French spymaster had risen to take the Tulip’s place, a shadowy figure known only as “the Gardener.”
    Talk about nerve. It was one thing to pick a flower alias like everyone else, quite another to proclaim yourself master of the whole garden, with the power to cultivate—and to cull.
    True, legend ascribed years more of deeds to the Pink Carnation, but by 1805, the Carnation’s reputation had been firmly established. It would have made sense for the English government to continue the use of the alias.
    Even in the warmth of the un-air-conditioned room, the thought made me shiver. I’d spent months living in the Pink Carnation’s head. The idea of anything happening to her was anathema to me.
    I know, I know. Even if she’d lived to a ripe old age, she’d be long dead now. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. But it mattered to me.
    Of all of them, option two was the most likely. It made sense for the Pink Carnation to change up her routine from time to time to keep the Ministry of Police off her tail. Complacency led to discovery. Wasn’t Hotmail constantly reminding me to change my password?
    But. That was always the problem, that word “but.” Miss Jane Wooliston and her chaperone, Miss Gwendolyn Meadows—known to the young men of Paris as something that roughly translated to “the Purple Parasol–Wielding Dragon”—were both fixtures on the Paris social scene until spring of 1805. In April 1805, there was a brief mention in the Paris gossip sheets of Miss Wooliston returning to