Unfortunately, the dissertation topic that I had chosen with such naive optimism at the end of my second year proved to be just like its subject: elusive. I was after a trio of spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, and the Pink Carnation, those daring men in knee breeches and black cloaks who twirled their quizzing glasses in the face of danger and never failed to confound the agents of the French Republic.

Unfortunately, they also confounded me. There was, I discovered, a reason that no one had written a book on the topic. The material just wasn't there. True, we knew who the Scarlet Pimpernel and Purple Gentian were, and even much of what they had done, but the Pink Carnation's identity remained shrouded in mystery, the only evidence of his existence a series of contemporary accounts in newsletters and diaries, each recorded exploit more improbable than the last. Some scholars, sitting in the security of their twentieth-century studies, had decreed that the dearth of corroboratory evidence could mean only one thing. The Pink Carnation was a creature of myth, a deliberate fabrication invented by the British government to buoy their beleaguered nation through a prolonged and desperate struggle.

They were wrong.

I enjoyed a good little gloat over that. There's nothing like a little "I told you so" to make one's day. On a rainy day the previous week, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly, an elderly descendant of the Purple Gentian, had admitted me to a virtual Ali Baba's cave of historical documents, the diaries and letters of the Purple Gentian and his half-French bride, Miss Amy Balcourt. Then there was Amy's clever cousin, Miss Jane Wooliston—better known as the Pink Carnation. As a dashing spy, she was an unlikely choice. Whoever heard of a spy named Jane? Or Wooliston, for that matter? The very name suggested fleecy sweaters and woolly hats, a frizzy-haired Miss Marple puttering about the village green. It was the sort of discovery that had "tenure" written all over it.