The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel Read Free Page A

Thursdays).
    Now that he was coming to my turf, I wasn’t quite sure how we were meant to fill twenty-four hours a day.
    Today was Thursday. Sunday was Halloween, and, incidentally, my birthday eve. I was an All Souls’ Day baby, which was technically the reason for Colin’s visit. We were also just a few weeks shy of our one-year anniversary. Colin had been hinting for several phone calls now at a “special surprise.” I veered between expecting a proposal and a pair of thermal socks.
    All right, maybe not the thermal socks (although they would be useful if I returned to Selwick Hall for the winter holiday), but I was trying not to get my hopes up, and thermal socks were the least romantic thing I could think of. Naturally, the more I told myself “thermal socks,” the more I secretly convinced myself that Colin was going to show up with the Ancestral Ring of the Selwicks, prostrate himself on my none-too-clean floor, and beg for the honor of my hand.
    Or something along those general lines.
    There were a number of flaws to this fantasy. Among other things, if there ever had been an Ancestral Ring, I was reasonably sure Colin’s mother would long since have traded it in for something sleek and trendy.
    In an attempt at sanity, I said, “I’m sure we can make time for a coffee. What do you want to pick his brains about?”
    “Anything he can tell me about this ancestor of his,” said Megan, dodging a group of tourists who appeared to have meant to go to Au Bon Pain next door and were looking in vain for a connecting door.
    “That’s more my province than Colin’s. What about her?”
    Mrs. William Reid, née Miss Gwendolyn Meadows, had been the second-in-command of the Pink Carnation from 1803 through 1805. And I wasn’t entirely convinced that their connection had ended with her marriage. That was part of what I intended to find out. If I could figure out how. The paper trail had dead-ended on me and I hadn’t quite determined which tack to take next.
    “Well . . .” Megan fingered her beads, the same way she did when trying to figure out how to explain a text to a group of undergrads. “Basically, what I’m looking at are the intersections between fact and fiction in early vampire narratives. Of course,” she added hastily, “we all know that the vampire myth is merely a metaphor for sexual repression and inchoate class conflicts.”
    “Yup,” I said, nodding encouragingly. “But . . .”
    Reassured, Megan went on. “But there’s a chicken-and-egg factor. You get vampire scares that lead to myths that lead to scares that lead to myths. Many of them predating Dracula by a fair amount.”
    Without having to consult, we detoured into Toscanini’s for preclass coffees. The coffee in the Barker Center was of the college cafeteria variety, for emergency use only. “Where does The Convent of Orsino come into this? I’ll have a large Vietnamese coffee, please.”
    “And I’ll have a skim latte.” Megan rooted in her wallet for cash, dropping an extra dollar in the tip jar. “I’d thought The Convent of Orsino was a perfect example of an antecedent event transmuted into a fictionalized narrative in a way that reified class and gender concerns.”
    My head was spinning a bit, so I seized on the easiest piece. “What antecedent event are you talking about?”
    I’d spent a fair amount of time with The Convent of Orsino , and as far as I could tell, it was all fiction.
    Well, mostly.
    The book followed the exploits of Plumeria, the dashing chaperone, who teamed up with the aging-but-still-got-it Sir Magnifico to rescue Magnifico’s insipid daughter, Amarantha, from the clutches of the sinister but attractive Knight of the Silver Tower, aka the vampire. I was pretty sure that Plumeria was a thinly veiled alter ego for Miss Gwen, and I strongly suspected that the Knight of the Silver Tower was the French spymaster the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent—who, by the way, was not, as far as I could