The Temptation of the Night Jasmine (37 page)

I didn’t know what to say. Something about his tone suggested that he wouldn’t welcome questions about his father. The entire topic was too, too fraught. I felt like I was playing ‘red light, green light, one, two, three,’ that child’s game where you can only advance by increments when the other person’s back is turned. Revelation had to sneak up on him; I couldn’t force it. He would tell me what he wanted me to know in his own way, in his own time.

And then there was all that had been said by being unsaid. It made my heart wrench to think of what Colin must have gone through, seeing the centre wrenched out of his world. His change of career seemed in part a reaction to his own mortality, in part a tribute to his father. Either way, it went far deeper than mere fiction.

‘I’d love to read what you’ve written,’ I said finally, for lack of anything better to say.

It seemed to be the right thing. ‘Thanks,’ he said. The hint of a smile played around his lips. ‘You know, I did think of writing about the Pink Carnation initially …’

‘You didn’t!’ I made noises of exaggerated indignation. ‘So that’s why you wanted to be rid of me!’

The sound of my own voice made me wince. I was too loud, too strident, hamming it up to drum away the ghosts that seemed to be walking with us through the mist-ridden grounds, like natives clanging cymbals around a campfire to scare away the spirits.

‘One of the reasons. There was Serena, too,’ he said, and I knew he meant Serena’s relationship with a man who had been dating her in hopes of access to their family archives. ‘But I did initially think of writing a sort of quasi-history, starting with the Purple Gentian and ending with Dad.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ I said teasingly, sliding my arm through his. ‘I’d hate to think of us being in competition. Not to mention that novels sell much better than histories.’

‘Tell that to Joan,’ he said dryly, but his arm tightened around mine.

‘Why did you even bother to tell her?’ I asked. Stupid of me, I know, but it bothered me that she had known before I had. She might be annoying, but she was quite attractive in her own way. And she had known Colin far longer. She had known his sister and his parents and the boy he had been before his father’s death. It all made me feel a little bit insecure.

‘I had hoped she might put me in touch with her agent,’ he admitted. ‘She wasn’t too chuffed at the notion.’

‘Won’t she feel like an idiot when you’re a best seller!’ I declared loyally. Too loyally. I was like a one-woman brass band.

‘Eloise?’ I tilted my head up to find Colin looking at me understandingly. ‘It’s OK.’

He didn’t have to explain what he meant. It was a little bit of everything: his father, the book, my silly assumptions, Joan. And it really was OK. We had, without my even realising it, overleaped an indefinable hurdle and landed safely on the other side. I was still getting used to the notion of Colin as novelist, but I found that I liked it. I certainly liked it better than the notion of Colin as spy. Of course, if I were a spy, trying to hide my secret identity from my girlfriend, isn’t that just the sort of cover story I would come up with?

Oh, no. I wasn’t letting myself go down that road again. Even if it might be a rather interesting road.

‘I know,’ I said. And then, rather nonsensically, ‘I like you.’

Colin’s eyes crinkled at the corners in that way I already knew so well. Funny how you can come to know someone’s gestures, their mannerisms, so well, while knowing so little else about them at all. But I was learning.

‘I like you, too,’ he said. And then he grinned. ‘But no more Errol Flynn.’

Everyone always does tell me that relationships require compromise. And if I wanted this to be a real one …

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tonight we’ll watch Bond. Just for you. But tomorrow I get
The Scarlet Pimpernel
.’

‘It’s a deal,’ said Colin.

In February of 1804, George III went mad. It wasn’t the first time. The king had famously gone round the bend in 1788, precipitating both a crisis of government and the movie
The Madness of King George
. The formerly model monarch gave way to wild fits of lust, making lewd suggestions to ladies of the court, developing a fixation with the queen’s ageing ladyin-waiting, Lady Pembroke, and, according to her own report, forcing his daughter-in-law Princess Caroline to leap over the back of a sofa to escape from his amorous advances (given Princess Caroline’s relationship with the royal family and her level of personal hygiene, one has to take that claim with more than a few grains of salt).

I took many of the details of the king’s illness in 1804 straight from the historical record. Like his other illnesses in 1788 and 1801, this one was heralded by rapid speech, agitation, and stomach pain. The king dismissed all of his pages and sundry Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. The Willis brothers, who had tended the king in his two previous illnesses, were flatly refused entrance, and a new doctor, Dr Simmons of St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, was summoned. Upon Dr Simmons’s arrival, he clapped the king into a straitjacket. The king was blistered, purged, and bled. An account of the king’s treatments can be found in Christopher Hibbert’s
George III: A Personal History
. For those who wish to know more about treatment of the mentally ill in Georgian Britain generally, I recommend Jonathan Andrews’
Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England
. For the behaviour of the queen and princesses during the king’s crises, I relied heavily upon Flora Fraser’s
Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III
. Fanny Burney, Charlotte’s favourite author, kept a journal during the king’s first illness, providing invaluable details about the king’s appearance and behaviour. Charlotte’s colloquy with the king in the library is heavily based upon Burney’s accounts of her own conversations with the mad king.

There, however, reality ends and fiction takes over. Unlike the king’s earlier illness, the queen was not forbidden the king’s chamber in 1804. The Prince of Wales did throw his oar in, lobbying for a regency (Princess Sophia’s irritated comment to Charlotte about her brother was taken from a letter she wrote to Theresa Villiers in 1804), but without any success. The French plot and the kidnapping are entirely my own invention. After treatment by Dr Simmons, the king recovered relatively rapidly and held on to his marbles until his final lapse into madness in 1810.

Would it have been possible for a spy to kidnap and replace the king? While it certainly didn’t happen (at least, not that we know of), I don’t believe it would have been outside the realms of possibility. Despite assassination attempts in 1786 and 1800, the king showed remarkably little concern for his personal safety. Burney’s journals recount the king (while still sane) slipping off entirely alone, without any attendants, to visit friends in Kew, causing the anxious queen to come searching for him (as Burney reports, ‘Yes,’ [the king] cried, ‘I ran here without speaking to anybody’). One of the most surprising facts I learnt in the course of researching
Crimson Rose
was that the king’s bedchamber in Buckingham House opened directly into the Great Library. Public access to the library was provided through the binderies in the basement floor. The presence of pages and other members of the king’s household would have ensured a certain modicum of security, but the sheer size of the king’s household would have also made it relatively easy for interlopers to infiltrate unnoticed.

By 1804, the royal court was no longer the centre of political power and patronage it had once been (a fact that Charlotte’s grandmother, reared in an earlier era, finds hard to grasp), but it was still an immense and complex entity that employed a plethora of people from all walks of life, from the Earl of Winchelsea, the King’s Groom of the Stole, all the way down to the seamstresses and starchers who dealt with His Majesty’s linen. For those interested in the workings of the royal household, I recommend the exhaustive report prepared by the Institute of Historical Research,
Office-Holders in Modern Britain (Volume 11): Court Officers
,
1660 – 1837
, which lists every single office in the king’s and queen’s households as well as the individual holders of those offices (just in case you feel a burning need to know the name of every one of the queen’s maids of honour). The chapter on the later Hanoverian court in Anne Somerset’s
Ladies in Waiting
provides a more general overview of life in the queen’s household, while Fanny Burney’s journals present a detailed personal account of the odd mix of formality and informality that made up day-to-day life with Their Majesties.

Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Queen’s House, now known as Buckingham Palace. Although St James’s Palace was still the ceremonial centre of royal life, the setting for the king’s formal levees on Wednesdays and Fridays and the Queen’s Drawing Rooms on Thursdays and Sundays, the royal family preferred to live in Buckingham House, which the king had purchased for Queen Charlotte in 1762. For those of you who have noticed that the palace looks rather different, it was; the building was extensively remodelled in 1847. For the details of the palace’s design and interior decoration in 1804, I am deeply indebted to Jane Roberts’s
George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage
,
Collecting and Court Taste
.

Like Buckingham House, Medmenham Abbey is a real location. In 1752, Sir Francis Dashwood founded the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe, known to posterity (although not to its members) as the Hellfire Club, providing inspiration for generations of libertines to come. Geoffrey Ashe’s
The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality
provides a thoughtful and thorough account of both Sir Francis’s club and those that preceded and followed it. As always, for the purposes of the story, I took some liberties with the record. I decided to place the Lotus Club’s orgies in the caves, even though Ashe states that, contrary to popular legend, the group’s revels probably took place inside the Abbey. Although the layout of the caves, including the River Styx, is much as I described, I added an anteroom to the back of the Banqueting Chamber and a ladder leading up to the mausoleum. Likewise, while the golden orb on top of the Church of St Lawrence was indeed hollow and designed to seat several guests, I moved it to the back of the church and made it accessible only by portable ladder.

As for the revels of the Order of the Lotus, they are very loosely based on the orgies of the Monks of Medmenham, combined with a few practices borrowed from a similar group that set up shop in Poona, in British India, in 1813. The Asiatic trappings represent a hodgepodge of unrelated elements appropriated, willy-nilly, for their exotic flavour. (Neither Wrothan nor Medmenham was particularly concerned with cultural accuracy.) Despite the genuine setting, Sir Francis Medmenham was entirely a figment of my imagination; upon the death of Sir Francis Dashwood (by then, Baron Le Despenser), Medmenham Abbey and its grounds were inherited by Sir John Dashwood-King, not the fictional Sir Francis Medmenham.

Tempted to unmask more flowery spies?

Read on for further details of the
Pink Carnation series …

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B
Y
LAUREN WILLIG

Nothing goes right for Eloise. The one day she wears her new suede boots, it rains cats and dogs. When the tube stops short, she’s always the one thrown into some stranger’s lap. Plus, she’s had more than her share of misfortune in the way of love. In fact, after she realises romantic heroes are a thing of the past, she decides it’s time for a fresh start.

Eloise is also determined to finish her dissertation on that dashing pair of spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. But what she discovers is something the finest historians have missed: the secret history of the Pink Carnation – the most elusive spy of all time. As she works to unmask this obscure spy, Eloise stumbles across answers to all kinds of questions. How did the Pink Carnation save England from Napoleon? What became of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian? And will Eloise Kelly escape her bad luck and find a living, breathing hero of her own?