I wasn’t surprised by the blank look. Colin had mentioned that as a young man he had read through some of the family papers related to the Pink Carnation, but there was no reason for him to remember Penelope. She had been only peripherally involved in the Pink Carnation’s activities. “She was a friend of the Purple Gentian’s younger sister.”

“And that makes her — ?” prompted Colin.

“Absolutely nothing,” I replied, quoting Spaceballs . “Actually, what it makes her is Henrietta’s correspondent. She got herself into a bit of trouble and was married off in a hurry and sent to India until the scandal could die down at home. When I was rooting around in your archives, I found a couple of letters from her to Henrietta.”

There had been two letters, both from the autumn of 1804, one marked Calcutta, the second, written a month later, from Hyderabad. It was the second letter that had mentioned a spy called the Marigold.

I had come across a previous reference to the Marigold in a different set of papers, connected to the same group who had tried to kidnap King George and replace him with an imposter under the guise of a recurrence of his old madness. The connection had piqued my interest. Plus, I kind of wanted to know what happened to Penelope. It is amazing how attached one can get to the historical subjects in the course of research. It becomes a bit like gossiping about old friends. You want to know how things turned out for them.

Boy that he was, Colin wasn’t interested in the personal bits, like just how Penelope had gotten herself into trouble and with whom. He cut straight to the chase. “Where do the spies come in?”

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Here’s what I have so far. . . .”

Chapter One

There were times when Lady Frederick Staines, nee Miss Penelope Deveraux, deeply regretted her lack of a portable rack and thumbscrews.