The Lure of the Moonflower Read Free Page A

Eloise,
    As you have no doubt guessed, this trunk was once the property of Miss Jane Wooliston. It traveled with her from Shropshire to Paris, from Paris to Venice, and from Venice to Lisbon.
    Miss Jane Wooliston. I lowered the note, looking at the trunk with something like awe. I had spent the past three years tracing the steps of the spy known as the Pink Carnation, following her from Shropshire to France, from France to Ireland, from Ireland to England. But in all of that, I had never encountered anything that had belonged directly to her.
    This was her trunk. She had used it in her travels, packed it with her disguises. It might, I thought with rising excitement, hold secret compartments, letters, clothing, clues to the Carnation’s personality.
    And more than that. I had hit a wall in my research back in the fall. I could trace the Carnation to Sussex in 1805—but no further. In the spring of 1805, she had dissolved her league and gone deep undercover. So deep that none of the avenues I had explored had yielded any trace.
    I had my guesses, of course. There were activities in Venice in the summer of 1807 that smacked of the Carnation’s style, especially as the episode also involved the French spy known as the Gardener, the Carnation’s colleague and nemesis. But I didn’t speak any Italian. I could have hired someone to go to the relevant archives for me, but . . .
    By then, grad school and I had already parted ways.
    Like all breakups, it gave me a pang to think of it. I knew intellectually that I’d made the right choice in jettisoning my academic career, but it was still hard not to feel nostalgic sometimes. I missed it. I didn’t want to go back—and I certainly didn’t want to be grading student papers—but I missed it all the same.
    It was Colin who had suggested that I take my notes and turn them into something else entirely, spinning the Pink Carnation’s story from truth to fiction. So I’d dropped my footnotes into the garbage and spent a fevered seven months banging out the first episode in the Pink Carnation’s career, closing my eyes in the midst of a Cambridge winter and trying to imagine myself back in France in the spring in 1803, when a young Jane Wooliston and her cousin, Amy Balcourt, had arrived in France.
    Oh, yes, and trying to plan my wedding.
    Between wedding and writing, finding out what had happened to the Carnation after that break in 1805 had drifted into the background.
    Until now.
    I returned to Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s note, but, maddeningly, she danced away from the main point.
    The trunk was abandoned in Portugal in late 1807, at which point it disappeared from view for the better part of two centuries. Why it was abandoned and how it came into my possession are both tales for another day.
    I could practically hear Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s voice as I read, and see that spark of mischief in her eyes. As with all good fairy godmothers, one always had the sense that there was one last trick she was holding in reserve.
    As long as she didn’t turn us all into mice, I was good with that.
    It seems only fitting that the trunk end its journeys at Selwick Hall. I give it into your care, trusting that you shall do your utmost to preserve the trunk and the treasures it contains.
    I remain, affectionately, Arabella Selwick-Alderly
    There was nothing at all about a key. For that matter, I realized, swiping at the cracking mud on my face, although there was the usual brass plate on the front, there was no keyhole. It was as blank as a building without windows.
    The trunk was like the Pink Carnation herself, a puzzle.
    Like other trunks of its type, brass tacks marched in long lines down the sides and across the lid. Ordinarily they might have been used to spell out a monogram, but here there was none, just the workmanlike lines of tacks.
    Two of which appeared to protrude slightly more than the others.
    It would, I thought, be very like the Carnation to hide the solution in plain