But me? I was going to England. The mother country. Home of scones, clotted cream, and BBC costume dramas. England, where they speak English better than we do. England, where no one waxes anything because everyone is draped in tweed. It would be just like being home in New York, only with cuter accents. I was going to the land of Mr. Darcy (and Mr. Bean, but, hey, every ointment comes with its flies) to research a dissertation topic that thrilled me down to the polish on my toenails.

Aristocratic espionage during the wars with France: 1789–1815.

Does it get any better than that? There could be little more thrilling than men in knee breeches meeting for huddled conferences in the back rooms of inns from Paris to Calais, smuggling aristocrats out of the clutches of the guillotine, while exchanging terse notes ending with the directive “Burn this letter.”

It didn’t occur to me until later that there might be a slight problem. Historians are dependent on documentary evidence for the reconstruction of the past. When the people involved routinely burn the documents in question, there isn’t a lot left to go on. In fact, there was nothing left to go on. I combed through the collections of the British Library, nagged the archivists at the Public Record Office, and tramped through an infinite number of country records offices, all with the same dispiriting result.

All I had were rumors and legend, garbled and inconsistent stories about the exploits of a spy called the Pink Carnation, who, if the London papers and the records of the French Ministry of Police were to be believed, had been a greater thorn in the flesh of the French than anyone with the possible exception of Wellington. And, of the two, the Pink Carnation had been in operation longer. Or so the stories claimed. On the theory that there ain’t no smoke without fire, I had confidently set out for material to verify that. And found nothing.