The Secret History of the Pink Carnation Read Online Free PDF

Pimpernel,’ Richard grumbled unthinkingly. Hit by a sudden, horrible surmise, he jerked his head up. ‘Mother, you wouldn’t…’
    Lady Uppington paused in her perambulations. ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she said regretfully. For a moment, she gazed dreamily off at an arrangement of flowers in one of the alcoves in the wall. ‘Such a pity. It would be so effective.’
    Shaking her head as if to whisk away the temptation of the thought, she resumed her brisk progress around the room. ‘Darling, you know I could never sabotage you. And you know both your father and I are terribly proud of you. Don’t think we don’t appreciate that you trusted us enough to confide in us. Look at poor Lady Falconstone – she only found out her son was an agent for the War Office after he was captured by that French spy and they started sending her all of those nasty ransom notes in French. And he never even had a special name or made it into the illustrated papers.’ The marchioness indulged in a maternal smirk. ‘We just want to see you happy ,’ she finished earnestly.
    Sensing another maternal oration coming on, one of those I-bore-you-and-thus-know-what’s-best-for-you lectures, Richard made a pointed move towards the door. ‘If that’s all for the moment, Mother, I really must be off. The War Office…’
    The marchioness gave another of her infamous harrumphs. ‘Have a good time at White’s, darling,’ she said pointedly.
    Richard paused halfway out the door and flashed her an incredulous look. ‘How do you always know?’
    Lady Uppington looked smug. ‘Because I’m your mother. Now, shoo! Get along with you!’
    As the door closed behind him, Richard heard his mother call out gleefully, ‘Almack’s at nine! Don’t forget to wear knee breeches!’
    The banging of the door drowned out Richard’s heartfelt groan. Knee breeches. Bloody hell. It had been so long since he had last been dragged by the ear through the dreaded doors of Almack’s Assembly Rooms that he had completely forgotten about the knee breeches. Richard looked understandably glum as he headed down Upper Brook Street towards St James Street. The prospect was enough to send anyone into a precipitate decline that would make the consumptive Keats and drugged Coleridge look like strapping specimens of British manhood. How did his mother contrive to rope him into these things? If the Foreign Office had thought to let his mother loose on France…she’d probably have the entire country married off within a month.
    ‘Afternoon, Selwick!’
    Richard absently nodded to an acquaintance in a passing curricle. As it was just after five, the hour for flirting while on horseback, a steady stream of fashionable people in carriages or on horseback passed Richard as they made their way to Hyde Park. Richard smiled and nodded by rote, but his mind was already slipping away, across the Channel, to his work in France.
    When he was very little, Richard had resolved to be a hero. It might have had something to do with his mother reading him the more stirring bits of Henry V at far too young an age. Richard charged about the nursery, duelling with invisible Frenchmen. Or maybe it came from afternoons playing King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table in the gardens with his father. For years Richard was convinced that the Holy Grail lay hidden under the floor of the ornamental Greek temple his mother used for tea parties. When Richard appeared with a shovel and a pickaxe while the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale was partaking of an al fresco tea, his mother was not amused. She declared an end to the grail-searching sessions at once.
    Sent to Eton to learn the classics, Richard raced through theadventures of Odysseus and Aeneas, earning an utterly undeserved reputation as a scholar. Richard burnt for the day when he could set out on his own adventures.
    There was only one problem. There seemed to be very little call for heroes nowadays. He had, he realised, the ill fortune to