The cause of all this chaos and confusion? I had a date. A real, live date with a real, live boy.

If this doesn't seem exactly stop-the-presses sort of stuff, then you've clearly never experienced the soul-sucking self-doubt that comes of a year without so much as an attempted grope. And the boy in question…Think a blond Hugh Grant without the sketchy past, or Errol Flynn without the tights. Unlike my other exes (and most Robin Hoods), he actually spoke with an English accent. Which made sense, because he was English, born and bred on the scepter'd isle, as British as HP Sauce, crooked teeth, and the Queen Mum's hat collection. What single Anglophile of a certain age wouldn't be smitten?

In my own defense, I hadn't come to England looking for romance. As a fifth-year graduate student with an increasingly angsty dissertation advisor and a research grant that didn't quite pay my rent, I didn't have time for men — at least not live ones. Unfortunately, the dead ones could be just as frustrating as the live ones. After three months hunched over a desk in the British Library Manuscript Room, three months of endless train rides to obscure county records offices, three months of assuring my advisor that, yes, everything was going just brilliantly and of course I would have a chapter for him by January, by November I had still been no closer to my goal: the unmasking of the Pink Carnation, the flowery spy whose very existence gave Napoleon an intense allergic reaction.

The fact that a whole legion of intensely interested nineteenth-century French agents, as well as several successive generations of scholars, had also failed ought to have clued me in.

But when has that ever stopped anyone? It's like the search for the mines of Solomon or the Lost City of Gold; that no one else has found it before just adds to the challenge.